Over a year after investigation into the
sale of N175billion OPL 245 oil bloc to Malabu Oil and Gas Limited was put on
hold, Senate has finally resolved to go ahead with the probe. The motion to
investigate the oil deal was sponsored by Deputy Majority Leader Abdul Ningi on
July 19, 2012. Senate went on its annual vacation and nothing was heard of the
matter until July 25, 2013 when Senate President David Mark suddenly announced
at plenary that the chamber will investigate the matter after all.
The Committees on Petroleum Resources
(upstream) and Finance, chaired by Senators Paulker Emmanuel and Ahmed Makarfi
respectively, are to investigate the controversial oil deal.
Mark said that although the “Senate stopped
short of naming the committees that would investigate the issue when we took
the motion (last year), the Petroleum Resources (Upstream) will take the lead.
The Senate’s decision was based on a
subsisting motion sponsored by Senator Ningi and 46 others.
Shell and Eni reportedly paid $1.1 billion
into Nigeria’s foreign account for the oil bloc. The government later
transferred most of the funds to Malabu Oil and Gas, whose account is allegedly
controlled by a former oil minister, Chief Dan Etete.
The oil bloc became a dispute between Malabu and the
international oil companies, while the government’s transfer of the money was
authorised by Attorney-General, Mr. Mohammed Adoke (SAN), and Minister of State
for Finance, Yerima Ngama.
Recall that in his lead debate urging the
Senate to investigate the oil deal, Ningi noted that Nigeria signed up to the
Global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2003, began
implementation in 2004 and later supported the policy with the Nigerian
Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) Act, 2007.
The objective of the law as encapsulated in
Section 2(a and c), included ensuring due process and transparency in payments
made by all extractive industry companies to the Federal Government and statutory
recipients.
The Act also sought to eliminate all forms
of corruption in the determination, payment, receipts and posting of revenue
accruing to the Federal Government from the extractive industry companies.
Senate, however, expressed worries over
recent clamour for a review of “circumstances surrounding a tripartite
transaction involving the Federal Government, Shell/Agip as well as Malabu Oil
and Gas Limited in respect of oil bloc referred to as OPL 245.”
Concerned that reports have raised legal
and ethical issues surrounding the transaction and pattern of distribution of
proceeds to beneficiaries, lawmakers stressed that if all the weighty
allegations are ignored, Nigeria may be sanctioned by EITI for violating a
global initiative to which it is a signatory and accordingly resolved to
investigate the sales.
But the Chairman of the Senate Committee on
Water Resources, Heineken Lokpobri (Bayelsa State), opposed the motion. He said
that as Nigeria’s highest law-making body, Senate should not wade into an issue
it knew little or nothing about.
Lokpobiri noted that the controversial oil
bloc was allotted to certain individuals by the late Head of State, General
Sani Abacha and was later revoked by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, which
was later given to Shell in 2002.
Mark said that there was no crime in the
Senate investigating the entire situation with a view to putting the
controversy to rest. “I know close to nothing about oil blocs and what I want
to ask is whether there is anything wrong with the Senate committee
investigating these facts and bringing them to us,” Mark said.
The storm over OPL 245 began to gather
almost at its birth in 1998, during the Abacha’s regime, when Chief Etete, his
minister of petroleum, awarded two oil blocks to Malabu Oil and Gas Limited, a
company he allegedly had 30 per cent interest. The company got the award five
days after it was born (April 29, 1998) with a “signature bonus” of $20
million, out of which it was only able to pay $2million.
Culled from The Sun
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