The Act Continues

There were subsidy claims for which there were no shipping documents or evidence of payments for the products in foreign exchange us other overpayments, wrongful claims, and breaches of the Various Petroleum Subsidy Fund guidelines also were detected. The Presidential Committee found that of the N1.3 trillion ($8.4 billion) verified, N382 billion ($2.5 billion) was fraudulent or questionable and should be recovered from the 107 oil marketing companies whose activities were verified.

The door was left open on some questionable transactions for companies that could produce further verifiable documentation to come forward for the transactions to be validated. The report recommended that several procedural and regulatory improvements be implemented to the process for managing the subsidy.

It also recommended sanctioning offending agencies and individuals, including the executive secretaries of the main regulatory agency overseeing the Petroleum Subsidy Fund, the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, and the external auditors of the Finance Ministry, Akintola Williams Deloitte, and Olusola Adekonola and Associates,' which were found negligent in their duties.

Based on the report findings and recommendations, it became clear that the Finance Ministry could not make payments to the oil marketing companies implicated in the fraudulent N382 billion ($2.5billion) in transactions. This decision was met with tremendous anger and resistance on the part of the companies whose transactions were implicated. There was also anger and impatience on the part of several companies not implicated because they felt the Presidential Committee's investigations and verification had further delayed their payments.

The tension was palpable throughout this time, and the head of the Presidential Committee, Aig Imoukhuede, came to tell me that he was moving his family out of the country to London because he felt that these were dangerous times. The refusal to pay fraudulent marketers-many of whom had powerful connections in government and society-was a difficult and dangerous one, as I soon came to know when my mother was kidnapped, and I was thrcatened with being maimed to get me to leave office.