Anti-graft Agencies To Investigate and Recover N135bn Loan – Senate

The Senate has said that it will work with the nation’s anti-graft agencies to retrieve N135billion in Central Bank of Nigeria intervention funds that were given to certain oil and gas companies.

The funds have to be recouped from beneficiaries who have fallen behind, according to the Senate Committee on Gas Resources.

When the 14 impacted companies showed up before the panel on Thursday to justify their use of the loans they had obtained, the panel issued the threat.

The members found the lack of cooperation on the project between the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the CBN to be unacceptable.

They also questioned why the cash were being distributed to the beneficiaries in an unfair way and why certain businesses were collecting more than the N10 billion credit limit.

In order to conduct prompt investigations, Senator Agom Jarigbe, the committee’s chairman, gathered the beneficiary data and project site locations.

Jarigbe bemoaned during the inquiry hearing that money disbursed from the gas expansion and intervention fund had been improperly accessed.

He said, “The task of the committee is to ensure that the companies actually expended the funds on what they collected it for.

“The observation of the committee is that there are inconsistencies in the process and the committee may not hesitate to involve the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to recover the funds.

“Some of the beneficiaries did not follow the guidelines. For instance, the ministry of petroleum resources is not even aware that the funds had been released.

“The guidelines stated clearly without ambiguity that they are supposed to do evaluation at the ministry before the list of the qualified ones would be sent to the CBN for them to access the loans but that was not done properly.

“We have also discovered that some of the companies do not have anything on ground since they got the loan.

“The committee would investigate all the observations and work on them and let Nigerians know the true position of things,” Jarigbe added.

However, theLegal Adviser to one of the beneficiaries, Lee Engineering and Construction Company, Mathew Agbadon, told the committee that the publication made by the committee had put the firm in a negative perspective.

He said, “There has been a fundamental misconception out there in the public domain that some people just leverage on the CBN money, stole it and went away.

“That is far from the truth. The truth of the matter is that as a beneficiary of that scheme, we had business with the commercial bank.

“The discussion was done at the commercial bank level and due diligence was done and our application was approved.

“Based on the application we accessed the facility as an organisation.

“Lee Engineering has been in the oil and gas industry for 32 years with over 4, 000 employees.

 “This particular project is one of the outfits of Lee Engineering and it is located in Warri, Delta State.

“If the Committee is ready to visit the project today, we are ready for it. It is 90 percent completed.

“It is billed for commissioning in the first quarter of next year. In fact we are looking forward to President Bola Tinubu to commission the project being the first of its kind in this part of the World.”

The Ministry in 2021 initiated the National Gas Expansion Programme (NGEP) to encourage domestic utilisation of gas in the country.