British company to audit Nigerian oil industry

Nigeria has selected a British company to audit its oil sector in the government’s most serious bid yet to bring transparency to a multi-billion-dollar industry plagued by corruption.

Hart Group of Aylesbury signed a £1.2m (€1.7m) contract with private and public sector oil officials to audit “the whole of the sector in which the federal government has any kind of financial interest,” the group’s managing director, Chris Nurse, said today

“The intention is to get a lot of the information which was previously regarded as commercially secret into public domain,” Nurse said.

The audit will cover 1999 to 2003, starting with the year President Olusegun Obasanjo was voted into office, and will take 65 auditors based in Nigeria and Britain a year to complete, Nurse said.

Nigeria is the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter and earned £13bn (€18.7bn) from the industry last year. Oil revenues account for 95% of foreign exchange earnings.

The audit could shed light on how much of Nigeria’s oil is stolen by criminals who siphon off tens of thousands of barrels daily from the West African nation’s pipelines.

The results of past investigations into Nigeria’s oil sector have been hushed up, including a report in the mid-’90s about what happened to an estimated £6bn (€8.6bn) windfall from oil price rises during the first Gulf war.