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Kenneth Udeh, Abuja
The Senate panel on Gas Resources investigating the N135bn Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) intervention funds given to some companies in the oil and gas sector has threatened to alert the anti-graft agencies to recover the money from defaulting beneficiaries.
The committee last week asked the beneficiary oil and gas companies to appear before it. The lawmakers issued the threat when 14 of the affected companies appeared before it on Thursday to defend the utilisation of the loans.
The 15 companies summoned by the Senate included Nigeria Independent Petroleum Company, Plc, ( NIPCO), Hyde Engineering and Construction Company, Pinnacle Oil and Gas, Dangote Oil Refinery, Lee Engineering and Construction Company, Nova Gas and nine others.
Checks revealed that in 2021, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources initiated the intervention fund in collaboration with the CBN.
The panel made their position known when the affected companies, numbering 15, appeared before it on Thursday to defend the utilisation of the loans they collected.
The senators described as unacceptable the fact that the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the CBN were working at cross purposes on the project.
They also questioned the discriminatory disbursement of the funds to the beneficiaries and wondered why some firms collected more than the N10bn credit limit.
But speaking at the investigative hearing, representative of the Ministry of Petroleum, Mrs Oluremi Komolafe told the Senate Committee led by Senator Jarigbe Jarigbe that the Ministry was not aware of the disbursement of the Intervention Fund.
Mrs Komolafe disclosed that 150 applications were received, 69 companies recommended and presently 16 applications are being processed.
She declared that the list of recommended companies were merely sent to the apex bank. “We wish to state that the list was not processed by the Ministry,” she insisted.
But the acting Director, Project Finance at the CBN, Alhaji Sahaad,said the apex bank only provided guidelines for the disbursement of the loan to the beneficiary companies.
He said the disbursement was done by the commercial banks whom he noted should take responsibility for due diligence.
“The primary responsibility is for banks. If we send a proposal to the bank, they have to subject it to due diligence. CBN was never involved in the disbursement.
“What we do is to ensure that they give single digit interest and a fairly long term tenor. The tenure for most of these facilities is 7-10 years.
“Our role is to facilitate the loan. ”
Senator Jimoh Ibrahim however faulted the submission of the CBN Director as he declared that N135 Billion could not have left the vaults of commercial banks without the knowledge of the CBN.
Senators Hussaini Babangida accused the Ministry of Finance and the CBN of working at cross purposes.
He said: “I am horrified that CBN and the Petroleum Ministry are working at cross purposes; this isn’t good enough.”
The Committee established that the banks violated the credit limit of N10 billion as some of the beneficiary companies received, N15 billion and N20b.
The lawmakers equally established that in violation of the guidelines, companies like Dangote Refinery and Pinnacle Oil and Gas used the fund to finance their refinery and depot projects, respectively.
The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Agom Jarigbe, collected the records of the beneficiaries and the locations of their project sites for immediate investigations.
Speaking at the investigative hearing, Jarigbe lamented that the funds released under the gas expansion and intervention fund were inappropriately 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 does 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, the Legal 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 leveraged 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 organization.
“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 utilization of gas in the country.
Some of the firms that claimed that they had no business with either the ministry or the CBN were rebuked by the committee.
They argued that the beneficiary got a single digit interest rate from the commercial banks because it was part of the conditions to access the loans.
