By Gift Chapi Odekina
House of Representatives committee on Finance embarrassingly walked out the Pipeline Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) for failing give appropriate figures on its daily output of Petroleum Motor Spirit (PMS) and other petroleum products in the country.
Chairman of the Committee, James Faleke and other members unanimously agreed that, there are discrepancies in the records presented vis-a-vis revenues due to the government was incoherent.
The Committee chairman also asked the agency to reappear on Thursday to give further clarification on the descripancies noticed their documents as the PPPRA Assistant General Manager (AGM), Corporate Services, Kimshi Apollo could not give clear answers to some of the questions asked by the lawmakers.
Trouble started as the Chairman of the Finance Committee pointed that the documents submitted by the agency showed that the daily output of PMS and other products has been the same from 2018 to 2019.
They also observed that the daily consumption of PMS was put at 48 million litres within the period under review while Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) was put at 10.5 million litres per day.
However, in another document the agency claimed that, it discharges discharges 59.90 million litres daily in January 2019, 55.04 million in February and 55.66 million litres in March.
The documents further indicated that, the supply jumped to 60.27 million litres in January 2020 then 60.56 million litres in February and down to 56.07 million litres in March 2020.
The supply further jumped to 61.92 litres per day in January 2021 and down to 58.09 million litres in January and moved up to 66.64 million litres in March 2021.
Chairman of the Committee Faleke also noted that the agency provided conflicting records on the daily discharge and consumption of petroleum products in the country.
“Tell us that the documents are not correct so that we can move forward.So, the data you gave us yesterday which says 52 million per day was wrong, so your Naira figure too will be wrong.
“We are working on this foundation, upon which we will develop and work with tomorrow,” he said.
In his response, Apollo said, they brought the constant figure of 48 million litres based on what transpired earlier Monday regarding the average daily consumption by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR).
In his ruling, the Committee chairman directed PPPRA to produce the records of all the daily output of petroleum products as well as the revenue remittances to the federal government unfailingly.
It also demanded from the Financial Reporting Council, the Accountant General Office as well as the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to scrutinize the records and reappear on Thursday.
“It was interesting to note that after submitting their data it is assumed they got to find out that figures in their records were doctored and ambiguous. So we are giving them till tomorrow to come back” .
