“Friends and countrymen; I beseech you by the mercies of God that ye do whatsoever it is within thine powers to prevent a frolic between the yam and the goat. For, as surely as the rising and setting of the sun, such an enterprise yieldeth only corruption, nay a sad ending for the yam” – Goodluck The Jonathan, First of His Name

Finally, we get a chance to see what PwC, the auditors, saw when they looked into the black hole that is NNPC. The full report is [url]http://www.premiumtimesng.com/docs_download/Full%20report--20billion%20dollars%20missing%20oil%20money.pdf[/url] (200 pages). It is not pretty.

I am not an oil and gas expert and much of the industry and how it works confuses me. But the PwC report is written in English so let’s try to parse it.

Remember The King?

A quick recap of what started all of this – King Mohammed Sanusi II, in his former life as SLS, the Central Bank Governor, told the nation that, based on what he had calculated, NNPC sold $67bn worth of crude in the period from January 2012 to July 2013. He then said that as custodian of the nation’s purse, he had only received $47bn of this amount. In other words, up to $20bn of the money was not accounted for.

Contrary to popular perception, SLS never did say the money had been stolen and he certainly didn’t name any names in his 300 page report submitted to the National Assembly. His main issue at the time was that, as CBN Governor, his job was to manage the exchange rate and the nation’s reserves. If there was $20bn out there in the wild, then his job was being made a lot harder than it needed to be.

He identified 3 ways in which the country was losing money as follows

1. Strategic Partnership Agreements – In 2011, as part of the efforts to promote local content, Shell sold its shares in 5 oil fields where NNPC was the majority shareholder. Shell had been the operator of these oil wells but NNPC awarded the operator rights to its subsidiary NPDC i.e. it allowed Shell to sell its shares but not the rights to operate them as it previously did.

NPDC then signed an ‘agreement’ worth almost $7bn with Seven Energy (3 fields) and Atlantic Energy (2 fields) for them to operate the fields. These companies of course had no clue how to operate the oil fields – Atlantic was registered as a company the day before it signed the agreement – so of course they sub-contracted the work to other companies. Seven Energy’s contract entitled it to 10% of the profits from the 3 fields while Atlantic was entitled to 30% of profits in its 2 fields.

SLS complaint was that these 2 companies were pointless and were just collecting money that should have accrued to Nigeria for doing nothing. Why didn’t NPDC just sub-contract the work by itself? The 2 companies also did not pay any taxes or royalties whatsoever to Nigeria.

2. Kerosene Subsidies – This one is fairly straightforward to understand. SLS did an analysis of kerosene prices in all 36 states of the federation in his report and found that prices ranged from N170 to N270 per litre.

Importers bring in kerosene and sell it to government at N140/litre. The government then sells it to local retailers at N40/litre with the understanding that they sell it to the ‘common man’ at N50/litre i.e government subsidises it by N100/litre. The retailers take the kerosene and sell it for what they like as stated above.

There is no sweeter corruption than this one. According to SLS, Nigeria was spending $100m per month on this pointless exercise. Not a single Nigerian anywhere bought kerosene for the ‘official’ N50/litre.

3. Swaps – Even with all the money going into NNPC, like a true apa, it is always broke. Due to the semi-dead refineries we have, NNPC of course has to import refined products (petrol and kerosene) but it often doesn’t have the money to pay importers in cash. So what it does it tell importers to import the refined products, then calculates the value of that product in crude oil and pays the importers with crude oil. This is how human beings traded before money was invented – trade by barter.

The problem here is that SLS said he had no idea how the amount of crude to be swapped for refined products was calculated. All he was able to find was that at one point, NNPC was ‘swapping’ 200,000 barrels of crude per day. That is a lot of crude. Did Nigeria get that much value in refined products? Who knows?


Enter PwC

The first thing to note is that PwC was asked to investigate all money due to the federation from crude sales to see what had been remitted and what, if any, was outstanding. It did NOT investigate the swaps or the Strategic Partnership Agreements as those were not part of its remit.

So what did it find? That the total revenues for the period in question were $69bn and not $67bn as stated by SLS. It had also remitted $50.8bn and not $47bn as initially thought. So, there was still a gap of roughly $20bn to be explained as before.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-28-at-23-01-42.png[/img]

Somehow NNPC managed to overpay $740m to the federation account if we accept its own numbers. As we shall see; NNPC cannot count, it cannot buy, it cannot sell.

Based on this, we can conclude that ‘no money is missing’ and close the case. Afterall, the numbers have been made to add up one way or the other – the $20bn that we thought was missing has been accounted for wan kain, as the outgoing President is wont to say.

But who or what gives NNPC the right to withhold nearly 30% of the money it receives on behalf of Nigeria and then spend it as it wishes? Here we have a goat locked in a room alone with a yam and no one to supervise what’s going on.

PwC’s opinion is that this practice of withholding money and then spending as it sees fit is highly dubious and that the NNPC act needs a legal opinion to determine whether it has the right to do this. What stops NNPC (the goat) from withholding 50% of revenues (the yam) and then telling us later that it spent it on one thing or the other? Based on this, nothing.


Kerosene Subsidy

From the chart above, we can see that the biggest expense in the accounting of the ‘missing’ $20bn is the petrol and kerosene subsidy at $8.7bn. Of this amount, NNPC claimed to have spent $3.38bn on kerosene subsidy. Yet, whether or not subsidy should have been paid was doubtful in the first place. Here’s the gist of what happened

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-28-at-23-18-47.png[/img]

In other words – anyhowness. Between President Yar’Adua who cancelled the subsidy but did not gazette it (perhaps because he was trying to avoid a public outcry) and President Jonathan who ‘unlooked’ Yar’Adua’s cancellation, NNPC stuck its fingers in its ears and continued paying the subsidy. A lot of magic happened as a result.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-28-at-23-52-59.png[/img]

First, PwC found $40m of kerosene subsidy payments were duplicated (see above). That is, subsidy was paid to the same marketer twice or more for the exact same kerosene. This was apparently a ‘mistake’. But even if we accept this, there’s more.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-28-at-23-37-36.png[/img]

The table above shows how NNPC is supposed to calculate subsidy on kerosene. That N34.51 is what it costs to get it to Nigeria. In other words, NNPC is supposed to sell it to marketers at that price (N34.51) and the marketers then sell to consumers at N50 – the difference of N15.49 being used to cover all their costs and a profit margin.

Instead, NNPC sells the kerosene to marketers at N40.90 i.e. taking some of the profit margin for itself. Why it does this, is a mystery. Nevertheless, when NNPC was calculating subsidy to be deducted (remember the yam and the goat are together), it used the figure of N34.51 even though it sold it to marketers at N40.90. In other words, NNPC charged marketers for a cost and also charged Nigeria for the same cost. This overcharging of subsidy on kerosene came to a cool $204m in total.


Nobody Is Above Mistake

It’s not easy for NNPC. When you are counting so much money, you are bound to make one or two mistakes here and there. It is these ‘mistakes’ that yielded the $1.48bn PwC asked NNPC to pay back to the federation. Some of these errors are as simple as wrongly adding a column in excel. These addition errors came to $40m.

There was also the overclaim of subsidies on petrol and kerosene (as described above). As well as other monies that should have been paid to the federation and were not paid. The table below shows the breakdown of the $1.48bn.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-00-11-55.png[/img]

One must ask – if PwC hadn’t gone in to audit the place, would NNPC have just let a $40m addition error go on like its nothing? The mind boggles.


Money Wey No Get Receipt

As part of the accounting for the difference of $20bn between what was received and what was paid to the federation, NNPC submitted some other costs it claimed it had incurred as part of its operations. In total, these costs came to just $2.8bn as shown below.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-00-20-25.png[/img]

As an auditor, when someone tells you they have spent this amount of money, what do you do? You guessed right, you ask for receipts.

A big chunk of the costs were for pipeline maintenance contracts. Anyway, NNPC could not provide any evidence for $305m of the money it claimed to have spent as the breakdown below shows

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-00-27-30.png[/img]

Perhaps it thought PwC won’t ask for evidence. Some of it is quite hilarious (one must laugh when one cannot cry). In January and March 2012, it claimed to have paid salaries totalling $14m. No evidence to back it up. In November 2012, it claimed to have paid another $6m in salaries. Again, no evidence to back it up. Who was it paid to? Mr Who.

Almost $60m went on ‘charter hire’. To charter what? When you find out, tell me (Actually I know what this ‘charter’ is – it is the payment for the Petroleum Minister’s jet i.e. NNPC was paying for the cost of purchasing the jet on her behalf. But please don’t quote me). For January 2013, it entered a cost of $31m. But PwC found that this was the same cost it had claimed in 2012. When asked for the evidence for the January 2013 payment, it presented the same evidence as the one for January 2012. It claims to have spent $2.6m on buying cars. No evidence. $48m ‘right of way’ costs. No evidence. And so on and so forth.

Also, as you can see from above, in return for all the selfless and glorious work NNPC is doing for the country, it paid itself a total of $1.5bn in salaries for the 18 months in question that PwC looked into.



NPDC – Awon Bad Guys

When some people commit murder in broad daylight. They don’t run away. They light a cigar and sit down beside the dead body waiting for police to arrive. When the police arrive and ask who killed the person, they confidently say it was them. People like these are known as bad guys and NPDC is one of such people.

NPDC refused to cooperate with PwC for the audit. It did not submit any information or provide any help.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-00-45-40.png[/img]

PwC then had to obtain information from a variety of sources (including NPDC’s website) to try to ascertain how much exactly it should have paid to the federation.

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-00-49-00.png[/img]

NPDC was summoned to the Senate sometime last year and they gave a presentation of their operations. The $6.815bn figure above in the NPDC column is what they claimed as the amount of oil they lifted. PwC also tried to verify this with the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) who gave them the $6.886bn figure. Finally, PwC tried to calculate the figures themselves and ended up with the $5.6bn figure.

Because they are bad guys, NPDC calculated its own tax and decided that the amount it was owing to FIRS in taxes was $1.14bn. Out of this amount, it claimed that it had graciously paid $863m to FIRS but does not yet feel like paying the rest. However, it was discovered that the actual amount it paid was $838m and that the $26m difference was due to a ‘mistake’ in counting the same payment twice.

All told, NPDC is holding on to $5.11bn that it has not remitted to NNPC (NNPC is the owner of NPDC so it should collect the money from NPDC and send to the federation account). This is PwC’s conservative estimate of what NPDC has withheld from Nigeria. Perhaps when the time comes for them to pay the money, in keeping with the goat and yam principle, they might tell us that they spent half of it on ‘costs’ and can only remit $2bn or something. We await that day.


Sorry For Your Loss

Other monies are missing. But what can we do? This is the tragedy of the goat and the yam. NNPC claims that crude oil theft and pipeline vandalism cost it $760m in the period in question. It is unfortunate.

NNPC also holds strategic reserves of petroleum products for the country. It is not free to hold these things and so the holding costs amounted to $460m in the period in question. These costs are made up of demurrage costs ($207m) and charges by Nigerian Ports Authority ($252m). Of the demurrage costs, $64m could not be verified while the entire $252m claimed to have been paid to NPA could not be supported by a single document as backing evidence.


#Forwards

The rest of the points raised are not things I understand very well so I have skipped them. But I think the above captures the gist of what has gone on.

So what can we do about this goat of a corporation? The rot in the place must be from ceiling to floor and you really cannot jail everybody there. A lot of the missing money will also never be recovered. So as much as people must be decisively punished for what has happened, how do we move ‘forwards’ and ensure this doesn’t happen again?

2,300 words is enough for one blog post so watch out for Part 2 (Below)

FF via @DoubleEph

Source: http://aguntasolo.com/2015/04/29/this-yam-this-goat-this-country-part-1/

hmmmmmm....breeze don dey blow small small...fowl yansh sef don dey open small small...

hmmm!
mathematics in every corner.
We go win cowbel tire.

Wow! So yam is the $20b and the goat is the GEJ and his cohorts. No wonder he said stealing is not corruption. Chaiii diarisgodu o...

Cc lalasticlala fp

thanks for the break........sweet gist wei go land some pple for PRISON even...

Funds are either unaccounted for or missing everywhere. GEJ and his cohorts won't be forgotten anytime soon.

“No one has the right to retain money that should come to the federation account. Constitutionally, it should come and then , if expenses are legitimate, they should be presented transparently and properly approved. To even admit that you have withheld $10bn or $12bn and then say this is what I did with it is, frankly speaking, not even the beginning of an argument” – Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, speaking to Gavin Serkin, author of ‘Frontier‘.


We now know the measurement of the yam ($69bn) that was left in the care of the NNPC goat. And we also know how much the goat handed back to the Nigerian treasury ($50bn). The debate now is what right the NNPC had to eat so much ($20bn) of the yam belonging to the Nigerian people, if it had the right to eat any at all.

A lot of the corruption and mismanagement and outright theft going on in NNPC is sickening and frankly, depressing. And it leaves Nigerians and especially the incoming government who campaigned from Potiskum to Port Harcourt with the message of ‘Change’. What do we do with NNPC? Can NNPC change? Can it be reformed? How do we change it? If you prevent the theft or mismanagement of even $1bn, that is potentially 1,000MW of electricity you can add to the grid. The sums in question are not small.

I Have Good News

In 2010, Transparency International and Revenue Watch carried out assessments of 44 oil companies (private and state-owned) around the world, including NNPC. On the question of Organisational Disclosure, here’s how NNPC scored in their ranking:

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-20-57-15.png[/img]

Yep, our own dear NNPC came last (or first from behind). TI and RW went on to describe NNPC as the world’s most secretive oil company. Nobody knew the size of the yam to begin with except the goat itself and it was never going to publish it in the newspapers. Any attempt at openness was always resisted.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as CBN Governor, said he became ‘obsessed‘ with understanding how the oil industry worked and where the leakages were happening. People who are obsessed about something can be very useful indeed.

It is important to understand this point – SLS had no direct access to NNPC’s books. From his letter to President Jonathan dated September 2013, it is clear that he got no cooperation from NNPC. All the numbers he used were investigated and determined by his office.

And yet, he came very close. He calculated NNPC’s revenues in the period to be $65bn while PwC calculated it to be $69bn – he missed the target by 6%. Here we have the ‘world’s most secretive oil company’ but someone looking from the outside was able to, with a bit of hard work and ‘obsession’, come close to figuring out the numbers. (PwC had access to NNPC’s numbers and documented all the revenues with over 30 pages of calculations in their report).

This is the good news I have to share – It is now possible to know almost the exact size of the yam even if NNPC don’t want us to know. They can lie all they want, obfuscate all they want, pretend all they want – that will not stop a serious and determined person from knowing. The game where the goat repeatedly under reports the size of the yam or even tell us there was never any yam to begin with, is over.

How Much Yam Did The Goat Eat?

Now that we are able to determine the original measurement of the yam, independent of NNPC, the next step is to figure out how much of it has been eaten.

The even better news is that this one is easier to determine. If NNPC pays money into the federation account, many people will know about it. The account is at the CBN. The only other place NNPC can send money to is FIRS, the taxman. This was the cause of the initial discrepancy where SLS said the amount outstanding was $49bn – some of the money had apparently been sent to FIRS instead of CBN. No problem.

The important point here is that CBN and FIRS are outside of NNPC. If NNPC don’t cooperate, other people can.

This is the second leg of the equation – we can determine the amount of yam sent to the Nigerian treasury. This greatly reduces the challenge of dealing with an opaque organisation that refuses to cooperate.

And it means we can reduce the issue to a simple question that puts NNPC on the defensive – the original yam was $69bn, you have given us $50bn. Where is the rest of it and what did you do with it? Simple.

Before PwC There Was KPMG

In 2010, KPMG was hired by the Federal Government to investigate the usual NNPC shenanigans. It submitted its report in November 2010. Find it here.

Here’s what they were asked to investigate as part of their[i] ‘Forensic Review of NNPC’[/i] (that forensic word again eh?):

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-21-46-32.png[/img]

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-21-48-40.png[/img]

It is not much different from what PwC were asked to do last year – determine the size of the yam and compare with what had been declared.

As usual, KPMG found NNPC up to their usual goat tricks and games. The one below was my favorite:

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-21-52-42.png[/img]

They did not even bother to tell a plausible lie. This is the confidence of an armed robber in action. Of all the places to obtain an exchange rate for something so serious as remitting money to the federation accounts, these goats claimed they got it over the phone despite the fact that the CBN published the exchange rates on its website.

So many issues were identified with the way NNPC ran its operations. Subsidy issues featured prominently as you’d expect. Here’s another sample:

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-21-58-15.png[/img]

The same goat games yet again. Every single failing identified came with a recommendation on how to fix it by KPMG. And what happened? It went in NNPC’s left ear and came out of the right ear immediately. In 2009, NNPC reported that it lost N8bn due to pipeline vandalism. KPMG recommended increased monitoring of pipelines and use of technology. Ok. By the time of the PwC report, they were spending $48m on ‘pipeline surveillance systems’. Alas, the amount reported as losses from pipeline vandalism has now transformed to $760m. Sebi you people said they should deploy technology? Ehen na.

In 2010, KPMG observed that they were using Sun Accounting Systems and noticed that the system was not robust enough for its needs given that the system was not fully integrated and excel was being used quite prominently. It recommended that SAP, a more robust system, be implemented as quickly as possible. No problem. By the time PwC did their work, they confirmed that NNPC was indeed using SAP. Yet, all that has happened is that a bigger piece of yam has disappeared.

See what KPMG said on their data management in 2010:

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-22-22-18.png[/img]

Now compare with what PwC found last year:

[img]http://aguntasolo.files./2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-29-at-22-23-38.png[/img]

Dem no dey hear word. Goats.


Are We Here For Tea Party?

Do we really have time for this merry-go-rounding where we will be carrying out a forensic exercise on NNPC every 4 years like it’s the olympics? And then the document is filed away and they pretend like nothing happened. I am not convinced that NNPC will suddenly come to a kind of enlightenment where they are able to look at the yam and leave it untouched.

In the meantime, there is a country in need of so much fixing that the problems are almost overwhelming. Every kobo counts and we can’t really afford a situation where people are making addition ‘mistakes’ costing $40m. We are not here for tea party as the intellectual Nigerian Minister, Musiliu Obanikoro, famously put it not too long ago.

There is something devious about NNPC and the way it seduces any government in power. Everybody ‘probes’ it but no one ever really reforms it. Obasanjo ‘temporarily’ made himself Petroleum Minister in 1999. He ended up doing the job for 8 years. NNPC enters the government like a virus and typically, when politicians are broke and looking for money, NNPC can produce the cash. This is how the corruption starts and typically, it can never be reversed.

A fundamental question must now be asked – is it really worth anyone’s time to embark on ‘reforms’ of NNPC? Are the chances of success for such reforms up to 10%, if not dead on arrival?

With Love From Mexico

In August 2014, Mexican President, Enrique Pena Nieto, signed a landmark energy reform bill into law. After 76 years, the law effectively turned Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) into a private company. It will now need to be audited regularly and publish reports like any other private company.

Part of the problem with NNPC is that it gets too much time alone with the yam before anyone checks what is going on. So we are reduced to the roundabout games of ‘forensic audits’ every 4 years for something that should be done regularly. 4 years is a long time – long enough for a multitude of yams to disappear without trace. Certainly, if NNPC was forced to publish reports quarterly and being audited yearly (with a regular half-year audit), there will be less room for the kind of long standing problems we are seeing.

I don’t think privatising PEMEX was an easier job than for NNPC, and yet a President who was determined to do it before he ran out of steam, managed to get it done. What’s Nigeria’s excuse?

With Love From China

Western countries have typically privatised their national oil companies e.g BP in Britain. This has not stopped oil from flowing out of the North Sea. The government simply focuses on collecting the taxes. True, the Norwegians still have Statoil (67% owned by the government) but we can all agree that the Norwegians are outliers – they don’t even spend their oil money hence their mammoth sovereign wealth fund. Also worth noting that Statoil is not fundamentally different in structure from Petrobras in Brazil. Yet, they couldn’t be more different judging by the ongoing scandal in Brazil that has hobbled the President, Dilma Rousseff.

The Chinese take a different approach – instead of having just one national oil company, they have three – PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC – mighty ones which compete against each other in some ways and also go out into the world to gain business and expertise. Further, you can find the accounts for CNOOC, PetroChina and Sinopec on their websites. Go to NNPC’s website. If you can find any accounts there, I owe you goat meat pepper-soup.

This options means we break NNPC into say, 3 new companies that compete directly with each other. Some might say when you have a problem like NNPC, why do you want to multiply it into 3? Good question.

The point here is that there are several ways to achieve the same thing. There is absolutely nothing that says we should have this NNPC model and keep ‘reforming’ or threatening to ‘reform’ it every few years. Or we can vote for change just like we just did in the national elections.

Scatter The Place

There is however another option. The first thing to understand is that it is not by force to have a national oil company. The decision that gave birth to NNPC in the 1970s – a creation of Obasanjo – cannot be said to have been the correct one. Indeed, at the time Nigeria was going about nationalizing things, the West and China were moving towards market economies. Since 1977 when it was established, the company has been a constant source of pain for the country. Much of what we are seeing today is not new.

My preference is for NNPC to be completely dismantled and the government moves to a tax based system. For it to cease to exist. For it to be completely neutered. We have had enough of this monster that no one is able to control anymore and which answers to its own rules. And now is the best time to deal it a decisive blow from which it will never recover. It has been exposed and is no longer able to be the secretive organisation it once was. If it lies, with a bit of investigation, we can find the truth. Nobody trusts a word it says anymore and the old trick of telling the public that we do not ‘understand how it works’ has now expired. We really do not even need to know. Once we know the original size of the yam and the amount it tendered, it will need to come up with an explanation for any differences.

What is needed now is political will to bring this goat to heel. It is all well and good making the right noise as President Buhari surely will. But the follow through is the koko. So many names are already being bandied about as possible petroleum ministers (mostly cowboys and charlatans so far). We are going to need someone who is determined and can zero in on a cause to smash this goat that corrupts a nation and its government to pieces. The person will need to have integrity in bundles. Ability to pray will be a bonus for we know there are demons in there.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that if you want something done, you should ask a woman. I know a woman who fits the bill for this job.

Her name is Obiageli Katryn Ezekwesili.




P.S I think it’s fairly obvious that people need to be severely punished for what has gone on in NNPC. But in case it’s not obvious that this is my position, I’m restating it. NNPC only gets away with what it is allowed to get away with. This must stop.

As someone said to me recently “I did not queue for hours on March 28th to vote for people to get soft landing”. President Buhari, be guided – People Must Go To Prison. No Ifs, no Buts.



FF via @DoubleEph

Source: http://aguntasolo.com/2015/04/30/time-to-make-goat-meat-peppersoup-pwc-on-nnpc-part-2/

lalasticlala, Seun kindly take to FP.

The piece is an interesting read.

The earlier thread did not position the pictures and links well enough to enhance understanding.

Thanks

OP u just inspired me to go read the 199 page PWC report...#where'smaglasses

Well written article, nothing much to say.

NNPC needs to be broken into 3 parts and then be privatised...simples.

The funniest part in the whole write-up for me...

adenitemi:

NPDC – Awon Bad Guys

When some people commit murder in broad daylight. They don’t run away. They light a cigar and sit down beside the dead body waiting for police to arrive. When the police arrive and ask who killed the person, they confidently say it was them. People like these are known as bad guys and NPDC is one of such people.

NPDC refused to cooperate with PwC for the audit. It did not submit any information or provide any help.