Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president, has
received a long awaited audit into billions of dollars of allegedly “missing”
oil revenues just 11 days before a closely fought presidential election.
The auditor general was asked to release key findings
of the audit “within a week”, Nigerian media reported.
The long delayed completion of the report coincides
with a growing furore in the final days of campaigning over Mr Jonathan’s
stewardship of Africa’s largest economy, which has been battered since last
year by the falling price of oil, billions of dollars of foreign investment
outflows and a depreciating currency.
The opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), whose
presidential candidate, former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, has positioned
himself as a strongman who can rein in corruption and end Nigeria’s terrorist
insurgency, is calling for the report to be published in full ahead of the 14th
February polls.
PwC, the international accountancy firm, was
commissioned to carry out the audit last March after Lamido Sanusi, then
governor of the Central Bank, publicly questioned discrepancies of more than $1bn per month
between oil sales and income.
Mr Sanusi warned that the alleged shortfalls — up to $20bn between January
2012 and July 2013 — meant that the country’s foreign reserves were under
pressure, even though Nigeria should have been benefiting from the soaring
price of oil and saving against an eventual fall.
The allegations prompted a political storm in Nigeria.
Following the revelations, Mr Jonathan suspended Mr Sanusi, now the Emir of
Kano, before his term as governor ended last June.
The president
described the PwC report, which was commissioned on the advice of Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, minister for finance and the economy, as “voluminous”.
“The auditor general will have a look at it and within
a week let us have key highlights because the media will want to the know the
key findings,” he said, and pledged to push through oil industry reforms that
have been held up in the National Assembly for years.
But the APC
insists that the entire audit, rather than just “key findings”, should be made
public. The party has made curtailing mismanagement and fraud a centrepiece of
its campaign to prise power from the People’s Democratic Party in what are
expected to be the closest elections since Nigeria’s transition from military
rule in 1999.
“Our position is that a full report should be
submitted to the public. Everyone should see it to reassure us that there is
nothing they are hiding,” said Bukola Saraki, an APC senator who sat on the
senate committee investigating Mr Sanusi’s allegations last year.
The controversy surrounding missing oil revenue was
revived again last week when another former central bank governor, Charles
Soludo, wrote a long public treatise alleging that an even larger sum than
$20bn had been squandered, prompting a furious public response from Mrs
Okonjo-Iweala.
Experts on Nigeria’s troubled oil industry said the
audit is unlikely to provide final clarity over how much went missing because
it had narrow terms of reference. It covers some of the money Mr Sanusi
suggested was owed to the treasury but does not address opaque crude oil swaps
— where crude oil is exchanged for refined petroleum imports without cash
changing hands — or the legality of production agreements which Mr Sanusi
contended had transferred control of revenues and profits from state-owned
assets into the hands of private companies.
“The key questions relating to crude oil swaps and
strategic alliance agreements that Sanusi raised were not on the table,” one
expert said.
Credit:
FT London
(UK-04 Feb 2015)
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