NNPC canvasses early passage of PIB

•Threatens Operators

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has  urged stakeholders in he nation’s oil and gas sector to work towards early passage of the much-awaited Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB),even as it vows to deal with any criminal act of fuel diversion by reporting offending operators to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for prosecution.
The position of the corporation was stated last week at a meeting between its group managing director, Engr Mohammed Barkindo and the newly elected leadership of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas workers (NUPENG) in Abuja.
According o him, the Bill is an all-encompassing law that will drive the sector to the path of sustainable growth and meet the expectation of the international community. “ We all now look on to the National Assembly to do what is right in passing this Bill into law so that the industry can once since the finding of oil have an all-encompassing law to govern the industry in the most transparent manner to meet the expectations of the international community”, he said.
The GMD tasked both NUPENG and PENGASSAN which according to him participated in the process leading to the drawing up of the Bill to continue to put pressure on the National Assembly to accelerate the passage of the bill. 
He stressed that “the Bill will provide us with the legal regulatory, environmental and commercial framework that would determine how the petroleum industry would be run in the years to come.  In the reform agenda of the NNPC and in the transformation plan for the petroleum sector, training is critical because from the diagnoses that we have carried out in the industry shows that the human capacity to drive the reform process is enormous”.
On current efforts that were being made to address the lingering fuel distribution system, the NNPC boss disclosed that some private jetties have been discovered, but lamented that some of these jetties were committing illegalities.
“In the effort to diversify our product distribution channels, NNPC had identified some private jetties for use in product distribution but we were taking aback to discover that some of these jetty operators were diverting huge volume of petroleum product put at their disposal”, he said.
He disclosed in hat in one of such cases,   NNPC was forced to take one of such cases to the EFCC to recover the full value of the product and to show to others that such fraudulent practice will not tolerated by government.