The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has said that it would start a comprehensive audit of revenues accrued to the country from the oil, gas and solid minerals sectors in January 2012.NEITI, which disclosed that the Chinese business entities in the solid mineral sector had perpetuated some illegal activities, stated that it was only awaiting the approval of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) before it could finally commission the processes of auditing the revenue inflows.The illegal deal, it was gathered, involved the acquisition or mining of a particular Nigerian mineral, while at the same time extricating and exporting other valuable minerals unnoticed without legal documentation or payment of commensurate royalties by these Chinese entities, thus22, suggesting economic exploitation.NEITI boss disclosed that the organisation discovered that these Chinese business entities would approach artisan miners to purchase lead mineral from them and would pay a paltry sums while their interests lies with the component economic minerals in the lead stone, which were far more expensive but procured very cheaply and exported for higher returns out of the country.Executive Secretary of NEITI, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, said: 'There is a new audit cycle that is supposed to start in 2012 and we have conducted the procurement process and received no objection from the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) but waiting for the Federal Executive Council's approval on the contractor for the contract to start.'The audit will be the oil and gas audit report from 2009 to 2011, thus bringing our audit report into current level. The solid minerals sector is also running side by side with the procurement for the oil and gas and we are going to start that in January next year if we get the FEC's approval within this week or next,' she added. She also explained that the much awaited 2008 oil and gas audit report, which is also the latest report which NEITI, underwent simplification processes into the regular English language, which would be published soon, and it would also be published into the three main Nigerian languages ' Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo ' for ease of understanding by local communities.Ahmed said: 'Of course, the 2008 oil and gas audit report will be out soon except for the simplification into the regular English language, and we are going to also put them into versions of the three main Nigerian languages for ease of understanding by all.'We are going to be capturing revenues that accrue from exports. We hope government will cause some level of processes to be done so that the component of whatever yields will be taken into cognisance. It is in this regard that the audit will cover financial flow, physical volumetric data and governance processes,' she added.Ahmed said the NEITI had no apology to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for its audit report, which indicted the corporation of owing N854 billion to the Federation Account.While pointing out that NEITI had not in any way compromised on its responsibility and was right with its report, she said: 'As far as I know, NNPC didn't deny the figures. The Group Managing Director of NNPC specifically said that the NEITI's report is in 2008 and their own report is in 2010 which they claimed makes it more current than our own and since then they have been involved in media campaigns to refute our claims.'They were unhappy that we didn't go further to state that they made other payments but we couldn't have gone ahead to state that when we have not audited the period they were referring to and of course we cannot state what we do not have facts to. 'We cannot say payments have been made. We are aware that payments might have been made because we have not audited and if we indeed say anything farther than what we have audited, we would be speculating. The information we presented is from the NNPC itself. The figure we reported was N842 billion which was as at December 2008 and it is correct. 'Included in that figure is the N389 million which is under the commercial credit period that the federation normally gives to the NNPC but as at the end of that period it was not paid because that commercial period was still running,' she stressed.
Click here to read full news..
