Racketeering Hits Lagos Depots As Fuel Scarcity Worsens

Racketeering activities are at the peak at some Lagos oil depots as marketers are putting more pressure to source for petrol at all cost.
Fresh facts revealed that some officials of the Nigeria Products Marketing Company formally known as Pipeline and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) now take advantage of the acute scarcity of the petrol to extort marketers by selling the loading ticket as high as N200,000 per truck.
In most of the depots, the Authority To Pay (ATP) popularly known as ‘ticket’ now only goes to some middlemen, denying the genuine marketers of access to petrol at the regulated price of N76.5/litre.
Some marketers at the depots who have been waiting to load products for months but they have not succeeded due to the new scandal complained to our reporter off records that some of them have paid for the products since December, 2015 but they were not being given the product, yet those that are willing to buy the ATP can get their truck loaded within days.
According to the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) pricing template, ex-depot price as at last week remained N76.00 but with the new trick, the price went up to about N125 per litre.
They accused some of the PPMC coordinators at the depots of issuing the tickets to their boys and give them back returns at the end of the transactions.
“Some of the officials in Abuja are also aware of the problem, because they use to send people to the coordinators to issue them the tickets. Just the same system they have been doing in allocating the kerosene.”
They called on the Minister of State for Petroleum Resource, Dr Ibe Kachikwu and President Muhammadu Buhari to completely overhaul the distribution sector of the NNPC and ensure that all those that are found guilty get the appropriate punishment.
“Without such overhaul, the effort of the minister and the president will continue to be in vein.”
Efforts to get the reactions of officials of the Nigerian Products Marketing Company (NPMC) were unsuccessful.
But a top executive of the company who confided in our reporter said that the issues raised would be addressed after a meeting with the Group Managing Director of the NNPC Ibe Kachikwu.