The Senate has asked the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) to submit a detailed annual report on how 70 companies that accessed the $330million intervention fund of the agency have utilised it.

Its Committee on Local Content gave the directive on Wednesday at a meeting with the Executive Secretary of the NCDMB, Mr Felix Ogbe, and senior management officials in Abuja.

The committee is chaired by Sen. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan.

The $330m intervention fund is domiciled at the Bank of Industry (BoI), and to be accessed by companies in the private sector for the execution of key projects in the country’s oil and gas industry.

However, the committee said it had received complaints that the fund was being accessed by a few privileged individuals under cover.

“There are allegations of the fund being kept for certain interests and Nigerians are complaining. We have to know how this fund is being accessed and utilised”, Akpoti-Uduaghan said.

“Submit to this committee the annual report of your project monitoring on these 70 companies and the projects they have executed.

“We want to know the names of the companies, the locations of the projects and the amount each of them borrowed from the fund,” she added.

But the NCDMB’s management, in a response, said there had been an erroneous impression that the fund was $500m.

The board said the actual figure was $300m and later rose to $330m.

Ogbe disclosed that 70 companies had so far accessed the fund, out of which five had fully repaid the loan.

He added that BoI carried out regular monitoring on the operations of the companies and the repayment process “because the risk is on the Bank of Industry.”

The NCDMB made further disclosures, saying that another $50m fund was available at Nexim Bank, out of which $20m was set aside specifically for women to access as loan to execute oil and gas projects.

The board added that yet another $50m was available as grant to support research and development in agriculture and in the education sectors.

On expatriate quota, the agency informed the committee that it rarely breached any of the regulations, adding that a guideline on expatriate engagement was strictly adhered to by the board.

The committee further directed that the agency should furnish it with the details of all the programmes of the NCDMB at the next adjourned meeting. (Nigerian Tribune)

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