$16 BILLION EGINA CONTRACT INVESTIGATION: SENATE INSISTS ON APPEARANCE OF FOREIGN FIRMS MANAGERS
Adeola (APC, Lagos West) added that if the situation were reversed with Nigerian companies doing business in Italy, the Italian Parliament will not take kindly to the non- appearance of the Nigerian companies CEOs to assist it in a parliamentary investigation.
The release issued by Chief Kayode Odunaro, Media Adviser to the committee chairman said,the foreign companies in the consortium with SAIPEM Contracting Nigeria Ltd are SAIPEM BV, SAIPEM SA and SAIPEM Portugal.
The statement said,only the Managing Director of the Allied Dominion Oil and Shipping Services Ltd, the only Nigerian company in the consortium, Mr. Tien George honoured the committee invitation along with Mr. D’Aloisio.
Adeola said their investigations so far shows that some of these companies that got this dollar denominated multi million contracts have only three staff adding that the foreign Managing Directors should come along with their stamped travelling documents to authenticate the claims they actually came to Nigeria to sign the contracts given to them.
“From revelations so far, it is like the more you look the less you see in the contracts that mid-wife the almost completed Egina Project. But we are optimistic that the investigations will result in refund of millions if not billions of dollars either to Nigeria Government or Total Upstream Nigeria Limited which will ultimately reduce the cost of Egina Project and result in advantage to Nigeria in the joint venture business that is to run for 25 year exploiting Nigeria asset”.
The statement emphasized that by the time all the unapproved cost variations by the various sub-contractors in the project are computed with additional sum to be recovered through computation of the differentials in the practice of main contractors getting contracts in mostly dollars and giving out contracts in naira is computed, it will be clear that the Egina project could have cost far less than $16 billion.
