The House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts has started investigation to unravel multi-million dollars debt owed Federal Government by terminal operators and failure by Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) to account for billions of naira accruing to the national treasury.
The investigation is sequel to 12 audit queries from Office of the Auditor General of the Federation on the financial statement of NPA for the 2019 financial year.
The NPA management, however, has only responded to one of the 12 queries: that is on indebtedness of terminal operators to the government worth $852.094 million and N1.897 billion.
NPA said N269.410 million of the N1.8 billion has been recovered, while the balance of N1.6 billion “invoices processed on encumbered areas remain unpaid”.
It said: “The sum of $504,663,452.37 is volume change on fix lease fee payment by APM Terminals arising from clauses in the concession agreement between NPA and APM Terminals out of the total sum of $852,093,730.77.
“Bill raised on encumbered areas, which remained unpaid is $19,169,459.00. The following has been paid- GMT-$54,707,700.08, unpaid penalties- $11,922,642.68 and unpaid VAT- $28,693,707.07.”
It said further: “$92,533,518.72 has been recovered, leaving unpaid lease and fee in the sum of $139,970,637.71 (made up of $113,982,486.82 and $5,988,150.89) respectively.”
Following the inability of NPA to convince the lawmakers, the committee, chaired by Wole Oke, summoned the NPA management to appear and reconcile its position with that of the Auditor General and provide evidence of remitting the recovered N269.51 million and $92.534 million to the treasury.