A Nigerian court will next week begins hearing two suits instituted by government to recover a total of $635m from two multinational oil companies, Total and Agip as the cost of the difference between the amount of crude oil the companies lifted and the quantity they declared.
In the two cases to be presided over by Justice Olatoregun Isola, Nigeria is asking Total E&P and Nigeria Agip Oil Company to pay the sum of $490,517,280 and $145,848,102 respectively as costs of undeclared or under-declared crude oil they exported from Nigeria.
In the statement of claim filed before the court accompanied by the sworn affidavit of three United States of America, USA based professionals, the Federal Government of Nigeria alleged that sometime in 2014, it realised there was a decline in the revenue derived by it from the exportation of crude oil.
This, the government said, necessitated an intelligent based gathering of data, which showed that part of the major reasons for the decline in the revenue from crude oil exploration was due to non-declaration and under-declaration of crude oil shipments made by some major oil and gas companies operating in Nigeria.
Consequently, Nigerian Government said it established a consortium of experts for the intelligence -based tracking of the global movements of the country’s hydrocarbons including crude oil and gas with the main purposes of identifying the companies engaged in practices that led to missing revenues from crude oil and gas exports sales to different parts of the world.
To reconcile the export record, Nigeria said it compared import records from respective ports of entry at the United States of America in the case of these two companies and others, the Data on shipment of the company, including its Bills of lading, Oil Vessels name used for the shipment, date of arrival at the destination ports, ports of origin, were used to identify the buyers of the undeclared Nigerian crude oil, and the sellers thereof, as well as quantity of crude oil exported from Nigeria, and the same data for the same shipment imported into United States were compared.
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Source: http://thenewsnigeria.com.ng/2016/09/nigeria-files-suits-to-recover-635m-from-total-agip-as-cost-of-undeclared-oil-exports/
