The Senate has vowed to ask the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC and other anti-graft agencies to go after defaulting beneficiaries of N135 billion disbursed by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN for the purpose of national gas expansion programme.
The Senators at the meeting frowned at the lack of synergy between the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the CBN on the project just as they also questioned the discriminatory disbursement of the funds to the beneficiaries and wondered why some firms collected more than the N10bn credit limit.
The Senate gave the order on Thursday in Abuja when the affected companies, numbering 14, appeared before it to defend the utilisation of the loans they collected.
The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Agom JarigbeJarigbe who collected the records of the beneficiaries and the locations of their project sites for immediate investigations, lamented that the funds released under the gas expansion and intervention fund were inappropriately accessed.
According to Jarigbe, “The task of the committee is to ensure that the companies actually expended the funds on what they collected it for.
“The observation of the committee is that there are inconsistencies in the process and the committee may not hesitate to involve the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to recover the funds.
“Some of the beneficiaries did not follow the guidelines. For instance, the ministry of petroleum resources is not even aware that the funds had been released.
“The guidelines stated clearly without ambiguity that they are supposed to do evaluation at the ministry before the list of the qualified ones would be sent to the CBN for them to access the loans but that was not done properly.
“We have also discovered that some of the companies does not have anything on ground since they got the loan.
“The committee would investigate all the observations and work on them and let Nigerians know the true position of things.”
