Between January 2011 and December 2014 under the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria may have lost up to $200 billion of oil revenue.
Popular human rights lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN) made this known as a speaker at a training on anti-corruption monitoring and reporting, organised by the Anti-corruption Situation Room of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) resource center.
The training held in Abuja on Thursday, as reported by TheCable.
Falana disclosed that a team of lawyers that he was part of investigated and found that Nigeria’s oil was siphoned to a seaport in Philadelphia, United States and possibly many others.
He said that the value of oil siphoned through the port alone amounted to $12.7 billion in three years.
Falana added that the Federal Government had no knowledge of the deals.
He said, “I belong to a team of lawyers that has done some work on the stealing in this sector and we discovered that between January 2011 and December 2014, we got the information from the loading point and countries of discharge.
“In a Philadelphia port in US we discovered that in three years, 60.2 million barrels of oil were not recorded here but recorded there in US for the purpose of taxation and valued at 12.7 billion dollars. That’s just one port in US.
“If you take all the ports in US where our oil was discharged at that period, I’m sure Nigeria will make about 200 billion dollars.
“We have not gone to China yet, India, Britain, France and all the countries that our oil was taken to during that period when there was total collapse of values and integrity of our country.
“That was the period everyone was stealing our oil. Because we couldn’t convince the government, they ignored our finding.”
Falana noted that all attempts to demand accountability from the shipping and oil companies involved in the matter have failed.
“We did a petition to the EFCC and wrote a letter to the Minister of Finance. Apart from reply that our letter is receiving attention, we haven’t heard anything.
“EFCC has been told to not touch oil companies unless there’s presidential fiat. We have gone to court, interestingly, the shipping and oil companies really have no explanation.”