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yesterday

Nigeria’s Senate Approves Oil-Theft Probe Report, Flags $200–$300 Billion in Missing Proceeds

Recovery efforts now move to international tracking under a second-phase mandate.

People queue for petrol at a fuel station in the outskirts of Niamey, on March 9, 2025. Since the beginning of the month, Niger has been facing an unprecedented shortage of Super petrol, the most widely used fuel in this Sahelian state of 26 million inhabitants. The country has experienced fuel shortages before, but never on this scale. The country's only refinery, Soraz, 'can no longer meet domestic demand', which has been soaring 'for more than a year', the state-owned Société nigérienne des produits pétroliers (Sonidep) said on March 8,2025. The main cause is the drying up of the flourishing black market supplied from neighbouring Nigeria, an economic giant and one of the world's leading oil producers, where prices tripled in 2023 after the government abolished petrol subsidies, according to Sonidep. (Photo by BOUREIMA HAMA / AFP) (Photo by BOUREIMA HAMA/AFP via Getty Images)

Overview

  • The adopted interim report covers discrepancies from roughly 2015 to 2023, with forensic and international reviews citing more than $200 billion unaccounted and some reporting putting losses above $300 billion.
  • Specific gaps highlighted include about $22 billion in domestic crude sale differentials and a separate $81 billion mismatch between NNPC declarations and CBN records for 2016–2017.
  • Senators instructed the ad-hoc panel to pursue global tracking and tracing, while leaders stressed that any actual recovery should be handled by executive agencies such as the EFCC or ICPC.
  • The committee attributes the losses to suspended upstream measurement oversight under the PIA, weak inter-agency coordination, unverified instruments, and poor enforcement that enabled diversion and opaque reporting.
  • Recommendations include enforcing international measurement standards through NUPRC or restored Weights and Measures, deploying UAV surveillance, creating a Maritime Trust Fund and special courts, implementing the Host Communities Development Trust Fund, and reallocating abandoned wells for regulated modular refining.