A report commissioned by Nigeria’s current Oil Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, has revealed that mismanagement and corruption in the country’s oil and gas industry has cost the Nigerian treasury billions of dollars every year, and that losses due to oil theft amount to around $6billion a year.
The Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force has calculated that more than US$29billion was lost in just the past decade because of apparent price-fixing in the sale of natural gas.
The taskforce asserts that vast sums were lost to the treasury due to price-fixing deals between government officials and Total, Shell, and Eni. It does not say laws were broken in the process, only that transactions should be transparent.
Some $3billion in royalties are said to be owed to the treasury, more than $566million in signature bonuses have not been paid, and there have been numerous discretionary awards of licences for which the companies involved did not bid – seven between 2008 and 2011 in which $183million in signature bonuses have yet to be paid.