The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has disclosed that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) under-remitted N77.92billion to the federation account in 2017.

The pilot study report on the sale of crude oil, however, noted that there is an ongoing reconciliation of the amount that arose from KPMG Forensic audit.

The watchdog organisation, in a statement by its Director of Communications and Advocacy Dr. Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, said: “Sum of N77.92 billion was under-remitted by NNPC to the Federation Account from Domestic Crude Allocation in 2017.

“NNPC acknowledges the under-remittance and states that there is an ongoing reconciliation to net off the N77.92 billion from “the established Federation indebtedness to the Corporation of N797bn arising arising from KPMG Forensic audit of the Corporation at the instance of the Federation.”

NEITI noted that the total revenue from sale of federation share of oil and gas for 2017 was $14.5 billion—$13.18 billion or 90.8% from crude oil and $1.32 billion or 9.1% from gas.

The NNPC, said the report, deducted N297 billion from earnings from the Domestic Crude Allocation as costs and losses, broken down as follows: N141.6 billion for under-recovery on petroleum products; N25 billion for crude and product losses; N130.4 billion for pipeline repairs and maintenance.

According to NEITI, from the report, the total crude oil production for 2017 was 692 million barrels.

Out of this volume, the share that went to the federation was 240.9 million barrels representing 35% of the total crude oil production for the year 2017.

A trend analysis for the year under review shows that the 2017 federation share was 4% higher than the 231.6 million barrels in the same category for 2016 but was 19% lower than the 297.8 million barrels for 2015.

The report said that this shows that while there was a slight improvement on the figure for 2016 (a year characterised by vandalism and sabotage of oil facilities), crude production for 2017 was about a fifth less than the 2015 level. (The Nation)