Stakeholders allege manipulations in PPPRA template

Oil and gas industry stakeholders that gathered at a Roundtable organised at the weekend in Lagos by NewsDirect Newspaper have alleged that the current template used by the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) to determine the prices of imported petroleum products is manipulated to favour businessmen that have vested interests in fuel importation.

They also called on the administration of Muhammadu Buhari to disband the board of PPPRA as presently constituted, alleging that members are also businessmen with vested business interests to protect.

Speaking at a session, which was chaired by the pioneer Executive Secretary of PPPRA and immediate past Executive Secretary of Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), Dr. Oluwole Oluleye, a representative of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), who spoke in his personal capacity alleged that from the insider information at his disposal, the PPPRA template is “padded”.

“If you look at the template, the template is padded; the template is bloated. I am speaking personally and not as a government official, from insider information I have. This is the truth because at every step we take in arriving at a price for the product, we pay for it. They have what they call retailers’ and dealers’ margins. There is something allocated to them. When you start doing something like that, the landing cost or whatever you call it will be high. So, whether it is actual price or not, it is questionable,” he said.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, further stated that the PPPRA board is made up of businessmen with vested interests to protect and argued that it should be disbanded.

He described the business of fuel importation under the subsidy regime as the “surest” form of business, and queried a situation where the government pays the marketers exchange rate differentials.
Other discussants at the roundtable allied their views with his submissions and called on the government to review the template.

In his remarks, Oluleye also faulted the payment of foreign exchange rate differentials to the marketers, saying that he never condoned it during his days at the PPPRA.

He stated that the payment of foreign exchange differentials was not in his budget when he was the boss of the PPPRA.

“I never condoned any form of exchange rate differential. People now talk about bloated template. I don’t want to talk about it. I can talk of the one I did and the subsidy that period was less than N300 billion because of the lid on the amount that had to be paid.
 
So, a lot of money was saved that period and everybody seems to have some little money that period. It was not enough but it was not going into private pockets,” Oluleye explained.

Earlier in his speech, the Publisher of NewsDirect, Dr. Samuel Ibiyemi charged the participants at the roundtable to come up with actionable recommendations to enable the present administration to reposition the oil and gas sector on the part of growth and sustainability.

According to him, the recommendations of the previous roundtable had helped the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to develop its recent monetary policy.

[ThisDay]