The House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Accounts accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation of directing all the heads of the 17 subsidiaries invited to its investigative hearing not to honour its invitation.
The committee has insisted that the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mele Kyari, and heads of 17 subsidiaries of the corporation must appear before it on Monday to account for alleged mismanaged funds.
It also threatened on Friday, to invoke relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution to compel the NNPC and the 17 others to respond to the various audit queries issued by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation, in which they were accused of deliberate and reckless refusal to render accounts from 2014 to 2018 in breach of extant financial regulations.
READ ALSO: Senate Summons NDDC COVID-19 Palliative
Those subsidiaries with queries against them are the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company Limited, Petroleum Products Marketing Company Limited, Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, NNPC Retail Limited, National Petroleum Investment & Management Services, National Petroleum Exchange and the Nigerian Gas Company.
Members of the committee at the investigative hearing on Friday decried how those invited had failed to appear before them. The lawmakers therefore unanimously resolved to invoke relevant sections of the Constitution and Legislative Houses (Powers and Privileges) Act, 2018, on the NNPC and the 17 others to force them to appear unfailingly.
The resolution was in response to a letter from the NNPC signed by the Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Dr K. A. Olateru, with Reference Number NNPC/GPAD/008.5, dated January 5, 2021.
In the said letter, Olateru advised the House to direct all enquiries on PHRC to the corporate headquarters which handles the budgeting matters for it subsidiaries,
