MRS Oil: We Never Expropriated NNPC’s Products...

MRS Oil and Gas Limited has described as false, malicious and unfounded, the allegation that it expropriated petroleum products kept in its terminal by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on throughput arrangement, saying the allegation was a misrepresentation of the workings and processes of the downstream operations.

MRS in a statement yesterday said it was unfortunate that the national oil firm has chosen to repeatedly distort facts and malign the integrity of the company.

The company clarified that it entered into a throughput agreement with NNPC Retail on November 30, 2016, which stipulated that products would be stored in the company’s tanks comingled with products belonging to the company and any other client of MRS.

According to the company, the agreement also stipulated that the products would be delivered to NNPC or any of its designates within seven days of demand.

In line with this agreement, MRS disclosed that NNPC Retail brought a vessel named ‘MT Undine’ with 40,637,355Litres, or 29,000 metric tonnes, which berth at the company’s terminal on December 8, 2016, adding that 19 days after vessel discharge, no one from NNPC came to MRS to request to load out the products.

MRS further stated that it was constrained to send an email to NNPC demanding that they come and load out their products because it had other vessels waiting to berth and were incurring demurrage.

“On December 30, 2016, nearly a month after the vessel discharged in our facility, NNPC officials, bowing to our pressure, finally appeared to familiarise themselves with our loading procedure. Between the December 30, 2016 to February 14, 2017, NNPC only managed to load out 10,616,685 million litres, which was an average of eight trucks per day, as against our daily load out of 300 trucks. We continued to demand that they come and load their products to free up our storage tanks,” MRS explained.

On the February 4, 2017, MRS said it received an email from NNPC Retail, saying they had loaned their products to PPMC and as such should be allowed to load their remaining products.

It, however, noted that PPMC, which is another subsidiary of NNPC, also has throughput agreement with MRS and was also loading within the same period.

According to the oil and gas firm, between February 4, when it received the email from NNPC Retail and February 15, PPMC loaded 11,178,000 litres.

“At this point we had two vessels, Mt Lilac Victoria with 60,000mts and Mt STI Milwakee with 20,000mts of petrol. The vessel, Mt Sti Milwakee was a PPMC vessel carrying our 20,000mts of PMS. This vessel berthed at MRS terminal on February 17 to discharge her full cargo. Immediately after she berth, PPMC asked that the vessel be pulled out, without regards to the fact that all statutory payments in respect of this cargo had been made. All efforts to get PPMC to allow the vessel to discharge was refused and PPMC insisted that vessel be pulled out,” MRS explained.

The company said this singular action took three days, as all required approvals had to be obtained from the relevant authorities to allow a vessel to sail with full products on board.

“Notwithstanding the delay, the next vessel with 30,000mts berth the same day the PPMC vessel was pulled out and commenced discharge immediately. 24 hours after discharge commenced, we had filled up a tank and started loading out of that tank. Both PPMC and NNPC retail were therefore loaded within 6 days from when we stocked out and this is well within the contractually allowable period of 7days. This clearly shows that contrary to the claim by NNPC, MRS never expropriated NNPC products,” MRS added.

MRS further argued that if NNPC Retail had presented trucks for loading when their product came in, the company could have loaded them within a week, stressing that it was their failure to present trucks for loading that led to the three months’ period it took to load out their products.

The company maintained that NNPC has completed loading their products and have exceeded with over three million liters of MRS products.

“We would have demanded this excess; however, we know that these deficits and surplus products hold is usual in the throughput process,” the company added.