… says NNPC delayed in lifting products
Against the backdrop of claims that NNPC’s products stored with MRS Limited were diverted, the company has explained that it was the national oil company’s inability to present trucks for loading their product when it arrived, which led to the three months delay in loading the product.
On March 17, the NNPC announced that it had alerted the Department of State Service (DSS), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to assist it recover over 130 million litres of PMS stored in the facilities of Capital Oil and MRS Limited.
Ikem-Obih, NNPC chief operating officer, downstream, said the infraction by the two downstream companies was a clear violation of existing throughput contract, which prohibits the owners of the facilities from tempering with the volumes in their custody without NNPC’s consent.
“Those claims are false, malicious and unfounded; it is clearly a misrepresentation of the workings and processes of the downstream operations. It is unfortunate that the national oil firm has chosen to repeatedly distort facts and malign the integrity of our company,” MRS said in a statement sent to BusinessDay yesterday.
MRS clarified that it was not a storage company but a throughput company, which means that it acts as a product bank to different customers it throughput products for which they are expected to lift during a 30-day period.
It said it received the products on November 30 last year but “NNPC Retail (a subsidiary of NNPC) brought a vessel named MT Undine with (40,637,355 litres) 29,000mts, which berthed at our terminal on December 8, 2016 and 19 days after the vessel discharge, no one from NNPC had shown up in our office to request to load out the products.”
The company further said, “We were constrained to send an email to NNPC, demanding that they come and load out their products because we had other vessels waiting to berth and were incurring demurrage,” but no one did.
MRS Limited said that between the 30th of December 2016 and 14th of February 2017, NNPC only managed to load out 10,616,685 litres which was an average of 8 Trucks per day, as against its daily load out of 300 trucks.
The statement further said that PPMC a subsidiary of NNPC came on the 15th of February at the behest of NNPC Retail, loaded 11,178,000 litres.
“Immediately after she berthed, PPMC asked that the vessel be pulled out, without regard to the fact that all statutory payments in respect of this cargo had been made. All efforts to get PPMC to allow the vessel to discharge were refused and PPMC insisted that vessel be pulled out.
“This singular action took three days, as all required approvals had to be gotten from the relevant authorities to allow a vessel to sail with full products on board.
“Notwithstanding the delay, the next vessel with 30,000mts berthed the same day the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC) vessel was pulled out and commenced discharge immediately. Twenty four hours after discharge commenced, we had filled up a tank and started loading out of that tank.
“Both PPMC and NNPC retail were therefore loaded within six days from when we stocked out and this is well within the contractually allowable period of seven days. This clearly shows that contrary to the claim by NNPC, MRS never expropriated NNPC products.”
BusinessDay put a telephone call across to Ndu Ughamadu, group general manager, group public affairs division of NNPC for an opportunity to refute this claim. He said, “The only thing that matters is that we gave them 30 million litres and we have fully recovered our products.”
Asked to confirm if the accusations against the companies may have been hasty, he reiterated that what was important was that they had recovered their products.
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