Nigeria, world seventh largest oil producing nation, is yet to have an accurate data for number of oil theft after half a century exploration, which commenced at Oloibiri in 1956.

Although, staggering figures by foreign agencies quoted over $40 billion as annual financial losses to the economic sabotage, oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell whose partnership made the first crude discovery in the country said: “How much oil is stolen (in Nigeria) is difficult to estimate and varies according to sources”.

The agency saddled with the responsibility to keep statistics, the National Extractives Industries Transparency Initiatives (NEITI), had earlier owned up that there are still many areas of leakages in the Nigeria’s multi-billion dollars oil and gas industry but Shell said at the weekend that, only 2008, “there were 87 incidents of crude oil theft (known locally as illegal bunkering) from just the SPDC facilities. Incidents of malicious damage and pipe-line theft increased by 48 per cent”.

Authorities, the company said in its May 2009 edition of its in-house statement, “arrested a total of 82 people, and seized 43 tankers, 17 vehicles and 11 barges”, insisting that these “almost certainly represents a small fraction of the true scale of the problem”.

It continued in a statement entitled, “The operating environment” that in early 2006, “a series of attacks forced SPDC to shut down all operations in the western delta. As a result of this and other attacks, Nigeria has lost around in quarter of its oil production”.

NEITI had blamed the bad record keeping in the country’s oil business on regulators maintaining that differences still exist in lifted volumes of crude between the terminal operators and the companies making the lifting.

Chairman of the National Stakeholders Working Group (NSWG), of NEITI, Prof. Assisi Asobie, stated this at the flag-off of a public debate on the report submitted by its consultants, the Hart Group, to it.

Noting that the amounts involved in some of these areas of ‘possible loss’ were very significant, Asobie put the possible shortfall in the payments of royalty and petroleum profit tax resulting from anomaly in the interpretation and application of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) clauses and the clause of the relevant laws at US$242.9 million and US $309.9 million respectively.

He had stressed that the “companies estimated that the NNPC owed the Federation Account the sum of N654 billion; NNPC claims it owed N651.583 billion, but added that the sum of N222. 387 billion was being withheld as part of subsidy payments due to it from the federal government”.