Alleged Missing $20bn: Own up to your errors, NNPC tells Sanusi

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, yesterday, accused the Emir of Kano, HH Muhammadu Sanusi, of attempting to reinvent the wheel of his false allegations against the corporation, advising the former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to own up and apologise for his errors.

The NNPC was reacting to claims by Sanusi, who gave an interview to an international news medium, that the issues surrounding the alleged unremitted $20 billion have not been adequately addressed.

The NNPC in a statement by Mr. Ohi Alegbe, Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, said, “We believe that his royal dignity will be best served and preserved if he owns up to his error of raising false allegation and apologise for same rather than continue in error believing that if he continues to harp on his false allegation it will someday be accepted as the truth.”

According to Alegbe, the respected traditional ruler has got it wrong again in much the same way his failure to grasp the issues of remittances to the Federation Account led him into the embarrassing error of alleging that NNPC failed to remit $49.8 billion oil revenue into the Federation Account, an allegation which has since been proved to be false even by his own account.

He called on Nigerians to discountenance the latest attempt to resurrect the campaign of calumny against the NNPC.

Alegbe insisted that the latest strategy of Sanusi is against the findings of the Senate Committee on Finance and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who both cleared the NNPC of the allegation.

He said, “Our attention has been drawn to the latest gambit of the former CBN governor and Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, to reinvent the wheel of his false allegations against the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation by insisting, during an interview with Christiane Amanpour of the Cable News Network (CNN), that the issues surrounding his allegation of unremitted $20bn have not been adequately addressed.