NEITI meets Police, EFCC, others over frauds in the oil and gas industry

In a bid to take the fight against fraudulent activities in extractive industry, especially the oil and gas sector, a step further, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative held a meeting on Tuesday with officials from the Nigeria Police Force, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, the Federal Ministry of Justice, Code of Conduct Bureau, the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit, NFIU, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC.

The Executive Secretary of NEITI, Waziri Adio, said at the meeting in Abuja, that it had become important for the agencies to pull their different knowledge and powers together in order to adequately reduce or halt the fraud perpetrated in Nigeria’s oil sector.
Adio, also stated that the meeting provided his agency with an opportunity to adequately train officials in the anti-corruption extractive industry fraud units of anti-corruption agencies and law enforcement agencies on why the organisations must collaborate for the progress of Nigeria’s extractive sector.

He said: “Our job in NEITI is to do the audit reports and we’ve done so many of them in the past 15 years. So we can conveniently say that the country knows more today than it did 15 years ago about what is going on in the sector in terms of revenue streams and things that are not being done properly, as well as things that are being corrected.
“So other government agencies like you can say, ‘Wait a minute, is there an issue for reform here? What do we need to reform? Is there an issue for investigation here? What do we need to investigate? Is there an issue for prosecution here? Why do we need to prosecute?

“Therefore, where our work stops is where the work of others starts. But does that happen all the time? Not necessarily. We would love a situation where we can go beyond just the reports, stimulate and force the debates, implement the reforms, investigate, prosecute and convict people.

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“Because it is not just about getting the government to get all the privileges that it should get, it is also about putting a price on bad behaviour, so that when people do what they shouldn’t have done, there is consequence management. They have to pay for it as a way to make sure that they are punished for what they have done and also as a way of ensuring that it serves as a deterrent to others.”

The NEITI boss also explained that all the participating agencies at the meeting must work together if Nigeria must use the resources in the extractive sector for the benefit of Nigerians and stop sharp practices in the industry.
He said: “We need to pull the different knowledge and powers that we have together to make sure that we are able to do this across the value chain. Our (NEITI’s) work as important as it is, if it is not useful to you or if you don’t use it, then it is useless. So how do you take our output as an input for your own work? I say this because we don’t have the power to prosecute.

“So we think that if we produce our work and you take it up from there, you can say what we can investigate from this, who we can prosecute from this and what we can recover because all the time we talk about monies that have not been paid and things that have not been done.”

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