By Musa Adamu
Abuja
In line with its earlier pledge to open up the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for public scrutiny, the management of the corporation over the weekend commenced the monthly publication of its provisional financial and operational reports.
The publication which is available on the Corporation’s official website provides an overview of NNPC’s operations across the oil and gas value chain (Upstream, Midstream & Downstream) as well as NNPC’s agency function on behalf of government of the federation from the period January to August 2015.
The report specifically provides detailed and unprecedented statistical insight into crucial aspects of the corporation’s activities ranging from National Crude Oil & Natural Gas Production, Lifting and Utilisation; Refineries Plants Operations; and Petroleum Product Supply & Distribution to NNPC Budget Performance Report and Federation Crude Oil & Gas Revenue.
Illustrated with tables, graphs and charts, the report vividly throws light into aspects of NNPC’s operations that were once described as‘opaque.’
Issues like the status of the once misunderstand JP Morgan foreign account, management and custody of revenue from crude oil sales, actual production capacity of the refineries, dollar accruals to NNPC/FGN from export crude oil and gas, as well as receipts & payments are laid bare in the report.
The report indicates that a total of $607.8 million had been paid so far to the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) in the year 2015 from sales of export Oil and Gas as dollar proceeds.
A further breakdown indicates that the total export of crude Oil & Gas receipt for the period of January – August 2015 is $3.420billion.
Of the total receipts, the sum of $0.61billion was remitted to federation account as dollar proceeds while the balance of $2.815billion was used to fund the JV Cash Call for the period.
The report notes that the receipts witnessed a sharp decline of more than 67% from September, 2014, when the receipt was at its peak, to July, 2015 with dire consequences to the federation.
The NNPC informed that the continued decline in oil price led to insufficient cash available to meet monthly JV Cash Calls obligations of about $615.8million as appropriated by the National Assembly.
To mitigate this effect, NNPC was compelled to sweep all the export receipt to JV Cash Call funding implying a zero dollar proceed remittance to the Federation Account since the month of April 2015.
The sum of N723.82billion for Domestic Crude Oil and Gas Sales proceeds has been paid to the Federation Account from January to August 2015 as Naira proceeds.