Here is what he said according to The Nation:
The audit PriceWaterhouseCoppers (PWC) report which indicted the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was cooked from the beginning, the National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said on Friday.
He insisted that whether the missing money from the treasury was $1.48bn or not, the NNPC was corrupt.
Mohammed, who spoke to reporters in Abuja at the weekend before a debate organized for political parties by Centre for Democracy and Development, accused the NNPC of lack of transparency.
He said: “You see, the thing we have always been saying about NNPC accounting is that it is not transparent. There is nobody that can probe NNPC account because they receive, they spend, they keep.
“And one of the things we have been advocating in unbundling the NNPC is that the corporation should restrict itself solely to one thing: operation. We should have another body for regulation.
“But in a situation whereby the same person take receipt, field licenses and spend, what do you want to audit? You audit the book that I gave you so the book has been cooked from the beginning.
“But even if it has been cooked and they couldn’t uncook it and they are saying now it is $4billion or $1.6billion and $1.6billion is more than what the Osun State government receives a year. It is more than that because $1.6billion is almost N300bn. Osun doesn’t receive that in two years.”
“But what we want is a root and branch of NNPC where we have checks and balances. They cannot be issuing licenses, collecting taxes royalties, they cannot be keeping the money. It is not done anywhere in the world.”
He said that Nigeria needs public sector reform to fight corruption.
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