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Advanced Congress of Democrats (ACD), has urged the National Assembly to hold President Olusegun Obasanjo accountable for all the nation's lost oil revenue from 1999 to date....
Advanced Congress of Democrats (ACD), has urged the National Assembly to hold President Olusegun Obasanjo accountable for all the nation's lost oil revenue from 1999 to date.
Reacting to the recent interim audit report ordered by the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI), which said a total of $1,514 million crude oil revenue were unaccounted for, the ACD said the nation deserves full explanations from the President on the issue, which it described as scandalous.
The party, in a statement issued in Lagos yesterday by its Media and Publicity Committee Chairman, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said such revelation by London-based HART Group, a consortium of auditors, cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand.
The ACD also challenged Obasanjo, who remains the de facto oil minister since 1999, to also explain the claims of the auditors that about 10 million barrels of crude oil are still not accounted for during the period under review.
According to him, "since Obasanjo chose to operate without a petroleum minister for most part of his two-term tenure, he must take responsibility for all the allegedly missing oil funds," he said, adding that only Obasanjo could give account of our oil earnings since 1999."
The party also expressed shock at the audit revelation that billions of naira, in various categories of taxes and levies remained unpaid by various oil companies, at a period when oil prices climbed to unprecedented heights in the international market.
The ACD said it is a monumental tragedy, that the PDP-led Federal Government could look the other way while multi-national oil companies rob Nigerians of their legitimate rights and revenue and called for a judicial probe of the alleged missing oil funds adding that it must not be manipulated like the Nigerian Ports Authority's N89 billion contract scam probe by the EFCC.