Private Companies Still Owe FG #207m, Former NPA Boss Claims.

 A former managing director of Nigeria ports authority (NPA) Hadiza Bala Usman, has alleged that private companies and entities was still indebted to the federal government to the tune of 207 million at the time she was suspended from office.

Mrs Usman disclosed this in her book titled “stepping on toes(my odyssey in NPA)” in which she argued that she was wrongly accused and suspended from office by Mr Rotimi Amaechi, a former minister of transportation.

Speaking in the memoir, Mrs Usman claimed that Amaechi wanted her out of office at all costs because she was “unyielding to his request to back down on matters that were not in Nigeria’s interest.”
She said despite her effort, INTELs’ remittances to the Treasury Single Account (TSA) were infrequent as the company remained largely unaccountable.

She mentioned that as of the time she left office in May 2021, the last remittance into the TSA account was $30,233,769.85 made on January 2020, for revenue collected from International Oil Companies (IOCs) under INTELS’s agency for the period between April 1, 2018 and July 31, 2018, but added that as of May 2021, the sum of $207,646,757.26 already aligned as payment for the period between April 1, 2018 and September 30, 2019 remained unremitted.

“For example, while the total revenue aligned by the joint committee for the period between November 1, 2017 and March 31, 2018 was $77,973,005.49, only $22,270,774.32 was remitted to the service boats dedicated to TSA, the company retained the balance of $55,702,231.17,” she said.

She further mentioned that the situation remained a battle of sanity until March 29, 2019, when the NPA issued private companies a three-month notice of termination of the agency in line with Article 8 (C) of its agreement with the company, pointing out that a few weeks earlier, the authority had once again, written to demand full remittance.

She said that in a letter, dated as of March 1, 2019, NPA expressed concern over the company’s failure to pay all the revenue received on behalf of the Authority into the TSA.

“The contents of the letter highlighted that the supplemental agreement specifies that the full receipts should go into the account after which alignments is carried and private companies get paid. It was, however, unacceptable that an average of 80 percent of revenue was withheld by INTELS while a meagre 20 percent was paid to TSA. The authority then gave INTELS five days’ grace within which to remit the outstanding revenue. More than 20 days later, the company failed to respond to the request, and the authority was constrained to invoke the relevant provisions of the agreement for termination of the relationship.