Who got eight of the 77 oil blocks offered for bidding from 1999 till date by the Department of Petroleum Resources? This question remained knotty yesterday at the House of Representatives inquiry into the operations of the NNPC.

In all, 77 blocs were offered for bidding; 44 blocks were awarded, but only 36 recorded by the DPR.

The Hon. Igo Aguma–headed ad hoc committee sought to know the status of the oil blocks. The former director of the DPR, Mr. Tony Chukwueke, could not say much about the eight blocks. The committee had queried the discrepancies noticed in DPR’s submission on the number of blocs bid for and offered in 2005.

The records on DPR’s document did not correlate with the information available to the tally. The former director said 44 oil blocks were awarded but the shortfall of eight may be due to those that did not pay their signature bonuses.

"I plead that I be given until tomorrow to meet my people and sort out the differences," he said. The Committee, questioning what it called the unjustifiably high amount spent in the execution of the bid rounds, also faulted the shortfall noticed in the expected income from signature bonuses for the year 2005.

A member of the committee, Hon. Halis Agoda, observed that the amount claimed to have been revenue by the DPR was far below expectation.

He said: "This committee was told that the contract for each block that took place so far was about $6 million. Now, if that is so, this committee would assume rightly that DPR equally prepared budget for each of the blocks you awarded in 2005 bid rounds. We want to know whether the amount spent on each block in 2005 was increased; we want to know the total cost of the budget made in each of the blocks in 2005; the companies you awarded the contract to and the details of the contract."

He said that the committee should be furnished with the information, "so that we know if government spends more money by way of contract in preparing a block for concession than what it realises."

The committee also requested for the status of the remaining eight blocks. Agoda said: "I could only see 36 when I counted and not 44. Now if what I counted was 36, we therefore assume rightly that we have eight blocks somewhere unaccounted for. Can you give us the status of the eight?"

The former DPR director however requested for more time to check his records, claiming that he did not have sufficient records at the moment. The committee also told Mr. Chukwueke that the expected signature bonus for the year 2005 bid rounds was supposed to be N2, 629,275.667, but the government received N1, 71,246,277.

The former DPR boss said: "Of the 44 that were awarded, some blocks were defaulted; the winners did not pay the signature bonuses. This is the reason that the production sharing contracts were not signed and tomorrow, I will put that on the list of what we will give to you so that you see all those that were awarded, the ones that were paid and the ones that were not."

The payment by Oando for blocks 278 and 236 and Abbeycot and Coscharis for block 293 in Naira instead of dollars was queried by the committee. The committee noted that some companies were allowed to pay signature bonus in Naira instead of dollars as stipulated by the guidelines. But Mr. Chukwueke said that he received a directive to that effect from the Accountant-General of the Federation.

The Committee also wanted to know why some companies that met up with bid guidelines while pre-qualifying were disqualified and companies that did not even purchase application forms were awarded juicy contracts.

In a petition by Chief Emefo Etudo, secretary and legal adviser to Starcrest Investment Ltd, he claimed that about ten persons, corporate institutions, powerful individuals in Nigeria and some foreigners connived to neutralize transparency and integrity as enshrined in the guideline for 2006 bid round as they were able to seize an oil bloc, without the former President’s approval.

"The former President Olusegun Obasanjo did not approve in any way whatsoever, directly or indirectly what they have done. They connived with Mr. Tony Chukwueke, I will bring the facts and document to the committee," Etudo said.