The Federal Government has earned $3.420billion in eight months (January-August) from sale of oil and gas, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, has said.
A breakdown of the oil and gas proceeds showed that $0.61billion was remitted to the Federation Account as dollar proceeds while the balance of $2.815billion was used to fund the NNPC Joint Venture (JV) cash call (counterpart funding) within the period.
NNPC spokesman Ohi Alegbe said Kachikwu broke the news in his report on the Corporation’s operations for the year — in line with his promise to keep the books of NNPC and transactions in the oil gas industry open to Nigerians. Kachikwu at the weekend began the monthly publication of its provisional financial and operational reports, which detail the activities of the Corporation for Nigerians to read.
The report also noted that oil and gas receipts witnessed a sharp decline of more than 67 per cent between July, 2015 and September, 2014, when the receipt was at its peak. The decline has dire consequences for the Federation, it added.
The NNPC chief stated that the continued decline in oil price led to insufficient cash available to meet monthly JV cash calls obligations of about $615.8million as appropriated by the National Assembly. To mitigate this effect, the Corporation was compelled to sweep all the export receipts to JV cash call funding implying a zero dollar proceed remittance to the Federation Account since April.
About N723.82billion for domestic crude oil and gas sales proceeds has been paid to the Federation Account from January to August 2015 as Naira proceeds, he added, while $607.8 million has been paid to the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) in 2015 from sales of oil and gas as dollar proceeds.
Kachikwu recently promised to begin a monthly publication that will contain NNPC’s financial and operational reports. The publication, he said, will be available on the Corporation’s website and will report on the oil and gas value chain (upstream, midstream & downstream) as well as NNPC’s agency function on behalf of the Federal Government.
According to Alegbe, the report provides detailed and unprecedented statistical insight into crucial aspects of the Corporation’s activities ranging from national crude oil & natural gas production, lifting and utilization; refineries’ plants operations; and petroleum product supply & distribution to NNPC budget performance report and federation crude oil & gas revenue.
He said the report Illustrated with tables, graphs and charts, and vividly throws light into aspects of NNPC’s operations that were once described as opaque. Issues like the status of the misunderstand JP Morgan foreign account, management and custody of revenue from crude oil sales, actual production capacity of the refineries, dollar accruals to NNPC/Federal Government from export crude oil and gas, as well as receipts and payments laid bare.
