Posted on August 1, 2017
By Tola Adenubi, Nigerian Tribune
INDICATIONS are rife that the Federal Government is set to revoke some Joint Venture (JV) contracts between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and some of its JV partners handling dredging and channel management of the nations seaports in the Eastern flanks of the nation waterways. This is even as findings revealed that this JV contracts had risen in value to about N717.3bn between 2006 to 2015.
Speaking on live television over the weekend, the Managing Director of the NPA, Hadiza Bala Usman stated that the findings on some of the channel dredging contracts, as contained in a Swiss Court hearing, has been forwarded to the office of the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) for proper legal guidance on continued relation with the operators.
According to Usman, while speaking on Channels Television over the weekend, “Recently we had a situation where one of our technical partners in our joint venture companies was sanctioned in a Switzerland court for being said to have bribed officials of the NPA over a period. We have obtained the Swiss court sanctioning and forwarded same to the EFCC for further investigation on the persons and the entities that were said to have benefited from the graft. We have also forwarded the Swiss court documents to the AGF office for them to guide us on our continued relation with this entity in view of the sanctioning that it has gotten from the Swiss court for corrupt practices with NPA officials.
“For every corrupt practice that we identify, we forward to the EFCC to investigate and determine what prosecution process they will embark upon. When we identify a legal concern whereby there is a lack of clarity on the role of government or there is a seeming disadvantage that has been provided to the Nigerian people, we forwarded to the Attorney General to provide legal guidance on how we can exit some of these relationships.
“A lot of the corruption practices that we have identified within the port operation are attributable to certain contractual obligations the NPA had entered with entities whereby the federal government is short-changed. We are working at reviewing such agreements and we are working on terminating some of the agreements. We have reached out to the relevant agencies and communicated our position on this.”
It would be recalled that Swiss Prosecutors had about a month ago indicted four Nigerian government officials and Dredging International, a technical partner to Bonny Channel Management Limited (operator of the Bonny Channel Company, BCC) of bribe scandal at NPA.
The Swiss Court had sentenced the technical partner to a fine of one million Swiss Francs. The Court had also ordered the company to refund 36 million Swiss Francs which was described as illegal profits for alleged illicit payments to Nigerian officials.
Dredging International Services is a technical partner to Bonny Channel Management Limited (BCML) that manages the Bonny Channel Company (BCC) with the NPA under joint venture.
For 10 years, beginning from 2006, BCC carried out two major contracts a year; one in Rivers Port and the other in Onne Port. In 2006, the contract sum awarded was 127 million dollars.
Total contract figure was 163.2 million dollars in 2007; 195.4 million dollars in 2008; 143.4 million dollars in 2009 and 192.1 million dollars in 2010.
In 2011 the sum of contracts awarded to BCC for projects in Rivers and Onne ports respectively was 327 million dollars. Total contract sum was 300.2 million dollars in 2012; 296.3 million in 2013; 328.6 million dollars in 2014 and 286.2 million in 2015.
Curiously, the same contract of “Capital and Maintenance Dredging” is awarded to the BCC Joint Venture year after year. The company was awarded a total of $2.4 billion (or N717.3 billion) contracts in 10 years.
Source: Nigerian Tribune
