Trobell International Nigeria Limited (Trobell), the Nigerian company that uncovered $62 billion allegedly owed Nigeria by International Oil Companies (IOCs) said it engaged one of the best accounting firms in Nigeria, petroleum experts and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) to arrive at the figure.
The federal government is seeking about $62bn from IOCs as unpaid arrears from the Production Sharing Contract (PSC) agreement signed with them since 1993.
The Managing Director of the company, Mr. Tom Sede, in a statement to Daily Trust, said the Trobbell team underwent arduous task of computing the sums being owed by IOCs spanning over the number years production had been going on at all the production sites covered by the contracts.
He said after the computation, the chairman of the company, Mr. Lawal Garba on January 4, 2019, before the presidential election, issued demand letters to the various IOCs advising them of the amounts they owed the federal government while also demanding that they made arrangement to pay the stipulated sums.
He said: “Then all the IOCs that were written to ran to court to file cases against NNPC, Trobell and the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation.
“It was after the re-election of Mr. President that the oil companies being represented by their legal teams during the subsequent hearings of the cases succumbed to amicable settlement of the matter.”
In 1993, the NNPC entered the PSC with some IOCs and two clauses of PSC gave conditions upon which the terms could be reviewed. The first provided for a review of the terms if oil prices exceeded $20 per barrel but a review was never done even after oil prices crossed the $20 mark thereby leading to loss of revenue to the government.
Mr. Sede said the agencies that were responsible for recovering the money from the IOCs, for reasons best known to them, never applied the terms of the governing law to the contracts to collect that money.
