Executive Secretary/CEO of Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Ogbonnaya Orji, has said Nigeria spent $74.386 billion on fuel subsidies by successive administrations since 2011.
Orji in a report to the report to the Chairman, House Committee on Public Accounts, Bamidele Salam, during an interactive session in Abuja, also claimed over N16.25 trillion was lost to oil theft in the country.
According to him, NEITI also uncovered over $8.3 billion unremitted revenue by some privately owned oil firms and Federal Government-owned Agencies which was not paid into the Federation Account, in deviant to provisions in the extant financial regulations.
He, however, noted that the Agency is working with various enforcement Institutions including Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices and related offences Commission (ICPC) as well as Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) in the bid to recover the find into government’s coffers.
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He said: “I have here, for instance, revenues we have earned from oil and gas since 1999. We also have here all the subsidy payments made. Since 2005 when it became a scandal, we began to collect the data. We began to ask question on subsidy and as at 2021, the country had paid, $74.386 billion on subsidy.
“And we have breakdown of what was paid each year. We have also got a conversion of what that can possibly translate to”, he stated.
He also informed the gathering that, $16.25 billion was lost to oil theft in Nigeria stating that the data was arrived at from a data collected from various sign offs by operators and government agencies.
