$12bn was Actually Missing not $49bn —CBN Governor

CENTRAL Bank of Nigeria, CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Wednesday, reversed himself from his initial declaration that the sum of $49.8 billion realized from the sales of crude oil between January 2012 and July 2013 and expected to be remitted to the federation account by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, was missing.

 Instead, he said $12 billion was the amount discovered not to have been remitted to the account within the period just as he regretted that his communication to the president was leaked to the public. 

Sanusi, who stated this when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance, to give insight into his letter he wrote to the president on the controversial missing money, said the letter did not indicate that the CBN had concluded its investigation on the matter.

 But the Minister of Finance, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, countered the CBN Governor’s position, saying: “I just wanted to add that we found about $10.8 billion. He mentioned $12billion.”

 Insisting that the letter was meant for the president to launch an investigation into the issue, Sanusi told the committee’s chairman, Senator Ahmed Makarfi: “I repeat, Mr Chairman, that we did not see the letter as a conclusion of our investigation but an invitation to investigate.

 So, the conclusion that $49.8billion was missing was wrong even though we had the allegation that it was unremitted.” “Now, since then, a lot has happened.

 We have heard the Minister of Finance, Minister of Petroleum Resources, Central Bank, FIRS, CPR, we have set up technical team and has started a process of reconciliation and there has been a lot of progress in that process. “

I found it very unfortunate it was leaked to the press and the answer is ‘yes’, the CBN Governor did send that letter with those contents. By way of those contents, the Central Bank and Finance Ministry and the government were very much concerned over the years at the very low rate of accretion to the reserves in spite of very high level of oil prices and in particular, depletion of excess crude account in spite of what seems to be very high level of oil sales.

 “Now, in investigation and trying to understand where those leakages were, our attention was drawn to a huge difference between what appeared to be export of crude made by NNPC and amount repatriated into the crude equity account of the federal government. “

The numbers were about $65 billion exported by NNPC and about $15 billion repatriated to Federation Account out of that.

 Now, in view with our duty as the banker of the government, we had the responsibility of alerting the president and request a thorough investigation of this matter, he said.