The Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) has firmly refuted circulating allegations suggesting that the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) lacks the authority to issue oil import licenses.
The NMDPRA also clarified that it had not granted any permit to the Dangote Group for oil importation in July.
Speaking with State House Correspondents at the Presidential Villa, the Chief Executive Officer, NMDPRA, Engr. Farouk Ahmed, explained that the authority issued fuel importation permits to six companies to bring in the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) in July of which Dangote Group isn’t part of it.
Ahmed further explained that contrary to reports in some quarters that Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) issued the fuel importation permits to only three companies, he said that NNPC has no mandate to issue such permits.
He said that the notion that NNPC issued a fuel importation permit to anyone is not true.
The NMDPRA boss further clarified that although six companies have been approved for July, more 23 applications have been received and are currently being processed for subsequent approvals.
“As of this morning, for the month of July, we at least received and cleared six companies that have expressed interest and have vessels offshore that they needed to fix for delivery in July.
“We also have about 23 other companies that have expressed interest to import, and these applications are coming. As we speak now, they keep coming and we keep evaluating all of that.”
“So the good thing is that we actually have a lot of interest in companies wanting to import Premium Motor Spirit, which means that NNPC burden will be reduced because as we get more and more companies coming in NNPC might decide to also slow down in line with the provision of the law which FCCPC states that in order to avoid any monopoly no company should go more than 40 per cent.
“So in line with that, however, prior to that happening, NNPC of course being the sort of last resort, has over 30 days sufficiency of premium motor spirt currently, as of today.
“Almost 14 days out of the 30 are on now, which means we have about 14 to 15 days sufficiency across the country.
“There are several companies that applied for fuel importation permits. So you can apply for importation to get access to the port. And by the way, we are open to all those who are interested in importing.
“We have guidelines which are not very stringent because we’re trying to encourage importation. There are six companies who said they want to import fuel in July. Of course, all the others may be imported in December, November, or anytime but for those who expressed interest in bringing in fuel in July, there were six of them as of this morning.
“The beauty of it is that there are interests which means that they have been able to have access to foreign exchange in order to import.
“Now, as we go along, of course, we’ll be briefing you on the progress or the achievements so far, but the important thing is that NNPC has 30 days’ fuel sufficiency, so we do not anticipate any gap in supply or in distribution.”
