- SOME largely unknown oil companies, which claim to have
privileged access to Nigeria’s prized sweet crude oil, are offering to sell it
at huge discounts with traders saying the deals are too good to be
genuine.
Reuters reports that documents available to it showed that
thousands of barrels of crude can be picked up at discounts of up to $10
million.
But the documents are suspiciously flawed, suggesting financial
scams. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has placed a “scam
alert” on its website warning of “unsavoury characters purporting to be bona
fide staff or contractors to NNPC or purchasers of crude oil or contractors to
the government,” the report said.
The sellers, according to the report, include one UK-registered
firm purporting to be near the top of a sales chain in which oil cargoes can
change hands up to half a dozen times before being refined.
Two of the firms contacted by Reuters said they were able to
sell oil cheaply because of special access to NNPC contracts.
The documents point to the difficulty faced by President
Goodluck Jonathan in making reforms when there is doubt over who is responsible
for selling the oil.
Nigeria has pledged to take measures to fight corruption in the
oil sector after a hike in state-subsidised petrol prices sparked mass protests
in January.
One recent step has been the creation of higher barriers to
entry for participation in NNPC’s 2012-2013 term allocations. The results have
not appeared since the initial tender document was released in March.
On Tuesday, Jonathan sacked the managing director of the NNPC
and three other senior directors.
“To further strengthen the ongoing reforms and in furtherance of
efforts to achieve greater transparency and accountability,President Jonathan
has approved the re-composition of the executive management team of the NNPC,”
a statement said.
Alexandra Gillies, governance adviser at Revenue Watch
Institute, said the proliferation of middlemen in selling oil since Jonathan’s
election last year, had resulted in considerable uncertainty over ownership.
“If NNPC only issued term contracts to companies with the
capacity to lift crude, then nobody would be able to pose as a company flipping
(reselling) a cargo. The confusion is a symptom of Nigeria’s sub-optimal system
for selling its oil,” she said.
A report that the government-funded watchdog the Nigeria
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) sent to the authorities
in January showed billions of dollars missing from oil revenues.
Five written offers reviewed by Reuters showed a close resemblance
to official paperwork circulated among traders, including documents attributed
to NNPC, stamps from terminal operators and shipping lists with vessels and
loading dates.
They include arcane oil market jargon such as ‘laycan’, which
refers to the timeframe for loading and ‘STS’ meaning ship-to-ship transfer of
the cargo.
One shipping list showed a tanker called the ‘Elsa Craig’ – a
name close to an actual Panama-flagged crude oil tanker called the Ailsa Craig
1 – next to other cargoes booked by western oil majors such as Chevron.
“They are full of imagination,” said a West African oil trader,
commenting on the document.
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