Nigeria Lost $200b From ‘Shady’ Oil Deals In Three Years – Falana

Human rights activist, Femi Falana, SAN, says between January 2011 and December 2014, Nigeria lost about $200 billion from shady deals in the Oil and Gas industry.

Falana said this in Abuja on Thursday, while speaking in an anti-corruption summit organised by the Anti-corruption Situation Room of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) resource center.

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He said according to investigations carried out by a team of lawyers, 60.2 million barrels of crude oil valued at $12.7 billion was diverted to a seaport in Philadelphia in the United States.

According to him, efforts to demand accountability from the oil and shipping companies involved have proved abortive.

“I belong to a team of lawyers that has done some work on the stealing in this sector and we discovered that between January 2011 and December 2014, we got the information from the loading point and countries of the charge,” he said.

“In a Philadelphia port in US we discovered that in three years, 60.2 million barrels of oil were not recorded here but recorded there in US for the purpose of taxation and valued at 12.7 billion dollars. That’s just one port in US.

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“If you take all the ports in US where our oil was discharged at that period, I’m sure Nigeria will make about 200 billion dollars.

“We have not gone to China yet, India, Britain, France and all the countries that our oil was taken to during that period when there was total collapse of values and integrity of our country.

“That was the period everyone was stealing our oil. Because we couldn’t convince the government, they ignored our finding.

“We did a petition to the EFCC and wrote a letter to the Minister of Finance. Apart from reply that our letter is receiving attention, we haven’t heard anything.

“EFCC has been told to not touch oil companies unless there’s presidential fiat. We have gone to court, interestingly, the shipping and oil companies really have no explanation.”

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