The Senate yesterday asked the National Petroleum Investment Management Services, (NAPTIMS) to account for alleged missing $246 million.
The amount is said to form the balance from the 2016 budget set aside by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for gas infrastructure.
The Senate said that the NNPC had released a total of $446 million to NAPTIMS for the development of gas infrastructure last year while only $132 million was extended.
This was the position of the Senate yesterday when the Group Managing Director of NAPTIMS, Dafe Sejebor, appeared before the Senate joint committees on Gas, Petroleum, (Upstream and Downstream)
to defend the 2017 budget defence of the NNPC’ s Upstream sector.
The Joint committees insisted that NAPTIMS must provide details of the outstanding amount in the next sitting for proper clarification to approve the 2017 budget proposal of the NNPC’s Subsidiary.
Chairman, Senate Committee on Gas Resources, Senator Albert Bassey Akpan, took as swipe at the company for unilaterally moving funds from one budgetary subhead to another subhead without recourse to the National Assembly.
He said, “It is the constitutional responsibility of the National Assembly to vire funds from one subhead in the budget to another. So it is wrong for the company to have moved funds meant for gas infrastructure projects to another subhead.”
The committee chairman accused the company of abuse of due process when it presented its 2016 budget performance to the committee.
Senator Akpan reminded the company that a budgetary balance of $1.8 billion was carried over from 2015 to 2016, while the sum of $ 3.8 billion was provided for in 2016 out of which it spent $4.2 billion leaving a huge balance, adding that $422 million was allocated in the 2016 Budget for.
