NNPC accuses oil marketers of sabotaging PMS importation

While oil marketers blame a lack of forex for abandoning the importation of petrol to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the corporation has revealed that oil marketers are willfully rejecting forex allocated to them due to an inability to make huge profits from the current pump price of N145/l.

Mele Kyari, group general manager, crude oil marketing division, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation stated this at an oil sector conference in Lagos yesterday. “We have ring-fenced all forex from the upstream such that those forex will be available at a fixed price; a price that the CBN has agreed. I am part of the people who are involved in making sure that the forex is available.”

‘’ I am part of the committee allocating those forex, and I know we gave you forex, but you returned it,” he said. Kyari further said that the reason given by the marketers was that the forex given them to import was not enough. “But that is not the truth. The truth is that if you go to the market today and buy products and land here, you are required to sell it at N145 maximum. That is the main reason why people are not importing.

Kyari averred that the marketers were angling for an increase in the price of PMS but he maintained that the current economic and political conditions in the country will make it suicidal for the government effect such an increase. Earlier this month, President Muhammadu Buhari said that a large proportion of oil marketers’ activities are fraudulent at an interactive session in Berlin with representatives of the Nigerian community in Germany

Last month, the House of Representatives decided to investigate an alleged N500bn debt owed Petroleum Pricing Marketing Company (PPMC) by major marketers and independent marketers. Meanwhile the marketers have urged government to accelerate the passage of Petroleum Industry Bill to grow the sector.

Tukonbo Korodo, NUPENG South West chairman said this in Lagos attributing most of the problems marketers were having to the lack of proper policy framework to guide the sector. “At present, government is a major importer of petrol through the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC); private depots are just helping NNPC to distribute the product. “For over six months, the government has abandoned the entire System 2B Network that sustained the country during last crisis of fuel scarcity,” he told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).