Nigeria’s Oil Company to Audit Accounts, Review Contracts

Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. Managing Director Emmanuel Kachikwu said he would conduct a forensic audit into the opaque accounts of the state oil company.

The audit will cover “all the way to 2014, 2015” and the NNPC will review all contracts with its joint venture partners and production-sharing agreements, Kachikwu told reporters on Thursday in the capital, Abuja.

“Having said that things have been done wrongly, things need to be done rightly,” he said. “We are doing a lot of work of repositioning, re-strategizing, getting the right personnel in the key places and setting a culture for accountability and service delivery.”

Kachikwu, a former vice-chairman of Exxon Mobil Africa, was appointed this month by President Muhammadu Buhari to head the NNPC. Buhari made cleaning up the 24,000-employee colossus — the largest government-owned company — a key plank in the election campaign that toppled Goodluck Jonathan from power in March.

The NNPC, which doesn’t publish accounts, has been dogged by allegations of losing billions of dollars of revenue since the 1970s. It had the worst disclosure record of 44 energy companies analyzed in a 2011 report by anti-corruption nonprofit organizations Transparency International and the Revenue Watch Institute.

We will “look at all the existing contracts; are they good? Are they ok? Do they need to be redone?” said Kachikwu. “What do we do to energize recovery and the income growth so that the government will have money to work with?”