The Senate has announced plans to engage Anti-graft Agencies in recovering the N135 billion Central Bank of Nigeria intervention funds allocated to certain oil and gas firms. The Senate Committee on Gas Resources issued this ultimatum to 14 companies during a hearing, demanding repayment from defaulting recipients.
The committee criticized the lack of coordination between the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the CBN, questioned the uneven distribution of funds, and raised concerns about firms exceeding the N10 billion credit limit. Committee Chairman Senator Agom Jarigbe collected beneficiary records for immediate investigation into the funds’ appropriate utilization.
“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, 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 leverage on the CBN money, stole it and went away.
“That is not accurate. The reality is, as a beneficiary of the scheme, we engaged with the commercial bank. Discussions occurred at the commercial bank level, thorough due diligence was conducted, and our application was approved. We accessed the facility as an organization.
Lee Engineering has a 32-year history in the oil and gas industry with over 4,000 employees. This project in Warri, Delta State, is one of Lee Engineering’s endeavors and is 90 percent completed. If the Committee is prepared to visit the project today, we are ready. It is scheduled for commissioning in the first quarter of next year, and we look forward to President Bola Tinubu inaugurating the project, the first of its kind in this part of the world.
The Ministry initiated the National Gas Expansion Programme (NGEP) in 2021 to promote domestic gas utilization. The Ministry’s Director of Gas, Oluremi Komolafe, informed the Committee that the Ministry was unaware of the fund’s disbursement, despite partnering with the CBN on the scheme. She stated that 150 applications were received, 69 companies were recommended, and 16 applications are currently in process. None of the firms in the processing stage made the list of scheme beneficiaries.
Some firms denying any involvement with the Ministry or CBN were challenged by the committee. The committee argued that beneficiaries received a single-digit interest rate from commercial banks as part of the loan access conditions.”
