KEY POINTS
- Auditor-General flags £14.3 million spent by NNPC’s London office as unaccounted, citing serious breaches of financial rules.
- NNPC insists the spending followed approved budgets, but auditors reject the explanation and demand recovery of the funds.
- The report adds to wider concerns about the company’s opaque spending, ongoing probes and years of controversial financial practices
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPC, has once again found itself under pressure after the Auditor-General raised concerns over more than £14 million reportedly spent on the firm’s London office without adequate documentation.
The red flag, contained in the Auditor-General’s 2022 report, marks the latest chapter in the long-running debate over transparency within Nigeria’s state oil company.
According to the report, auditors were not given the documents required to verify how the £14.3 million budgeted for the London branch in 2021 was deployed.
Investigators said they were unable to determine whether the funds were applied with due regard for internal rules, value for money or any of the safeguards laid down in public finance regulations.
Despite receiving replies from the company, the Auditor-General described parts of the response as untenable, insisting that the observations remain valid until proven otherwise.
Auditor presses NNPC to recover funds as earlier controversies resurface
NNPC’s management maintained that the London office operates as a service arm with an approved annual budget and argued that the 2021 allocation was spent according to operational and financial needs.
It added that records relating to personnel costs, fixed contracts and other overheads exist and can be produced upon request. Even so, the company said auditors had not identified which specific transactions required clarification, making it difficult to provide targeted evidence.
The Auditor-General was not persuaded. The report recommended that NNPC’s Group Chief Executive Officer ensure the recovery and remittance of the full £14.3 million to the national treasury.
Should that fail, it advised that sanctions stipulated in the Financial Regulations for irregular payments and unaccounted public funds be applied.
The latest findings surface at a time when the company is already managing several controversies.
A separate section of the report highlighted misappropriated funds, inflated contracts and irregular tax deductions amounting to more than $51 million between 2020 and 2021.
Another set of queries involved questionable expenditure of roughly N684 million on abandoned or unexecuted projects.
