Nigeria Loses Billions in Oil, Gas Theft
From UPI
LAGOS, Nigeria, Oct. 25 (UPI) — Nigeria is losing an estimated $1 billion a month to oil theft while fraudulent natural gas deals with international oil companies have cost the West African country $29 billion over the past decade, official reports say.
“The world is in the midst of a sustained oil boom. Yet Africa’s leading producer is hemorrhaging the proceeds,” the Financial Times observed Monday.
“The Nigerian treasury, which should be raking in record revenues, has been squeezed at both ends of the oil trade — upstream, by one of the biggest frauds in Nigerian history related to a fuel subsidy bill worth upward of $16 billion in 2011, and downstream, by the theft of oil of an industrial scale at source.”
Nigeria is one of the top 10 crude oil exporters but after decades of institutionalized corruption and inept management of the oil industry, the country’s economic backbone, the country has to import most of its refined fuel requirements.
