80% of corruption cases traced to oil sector – Dogara

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara on Wednesday said that about 80 per cent  of corrupt cases in Nigeria have been identified to have come from the crude oil sector.

Dogara stated this during the inauguration of an ad-hoc committee of the House set-up to investigate an alleged undeclared  $17 billion crude oil exports to global destinations.

The Speaker  who was represented at the occasion by the deputy speaker Suleiman Lasun Yusuff said if federal government was able to curb all oil related corruption in Nigeria , the country would have reduced about 80 per cent  of corrupt cases.

He  added that stolen oil income has serious consequences on the economy and charged the committee to get to the root of the matter.

“Nigeria is the oil producing country in the world that allows owners of oil wells to continue to drill oil till the product is completely dry without federal government making even an attempt to takeover the wells from these so-called owners”, Lasun said.

Chairman of the commitee, Abdulrazak Namdas in his remarks noted, many reports have been published about illegal bunkering in Nigeria among other bad practices in the industry but non have accurately esterblished the figures of crude oil stolen and sold to buyers globally within the period.

He said premlinary reports alleged that over 57 million barrel of Nigeria crude oil were illegally exported and sold in the USA between January 2011 and December 2014.

“The estimated revenue loss by the government of Nigeria is around 12,722,600,327 at an exchange rate of 196 to US 1 dollar. This translates to over 2 million Naira.

“If all revenue from crude oil export lost due to the activities of those engaged in illegal exports and sales of Nigeria crude oil are recovered from identified buyers of stolen Nigeria crude oil, it will go a long way to support developmental goals of the government of Nigeria,” Namdas said.