The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) says there is nothing illegal in its making  withdrawals from the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Dividend Account.

According to a statement released on Sunday by the Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs of NNPC, Mr. Ndu Ughamadu, the clarification was made by the corporation’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Mr. Isiaka Abdulrazaq at an interactive session with the media over the weekend in Lagos.

The statement said Abdulrazaq clarified that the Senate probe was not about missing money as was being insinuated in some quarters but rather an investigation into whether NNPC acted legally in withdrawing the sum of $1.05 billion from the NLNG Dividend Account to support fuel importation.

“We have provided the legal authority on which we rely to use funds from the NLNG Dividend Account to the Senate. We believe they will reason with us. But if need be, we will seek legal opinion on it,” the CFO said.

“NNPC is very open and transparent. We publish our NNPC Monthly Financial and Operations reports in the media. No one does monthly reporting, not even the international oil companies or the publicly quoted companies.

“The best they do is quarterly reports. But we do monthly reports of revenue (profit and loss for the entire corporation, including the subsidiaries). We do operations report on how much oil and gas was produced, sold and the monetary value, how much products the refineries processed and how much was imported and sold by PPMC.

“We do all these to defuse the perception of opacity. Yet some people still say we are opaque and I think that is not fair,” he stressed.

Abdulrazak added that as part of the stewardship accounting designed to make NNPC’s operations transparent to the public, the inherited six-year unaudited accounts of the corporation have been audited up to date, with the 2017 account fully audited, approved and forwarded to relevant authorities.