By Mbafan Ade (BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT) –
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said on Monday the earliest the corporation could issue its Initial Public Offer (IPO) to investors would be in the next three years.
Group Managing Director of the corporation, Mele Kyari, stated this during an interview on Bloomberg TV Global Financial News, just as the the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), announced that the amount spent on the importation of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) in the first half of this year jumped to N1.47tn (about $3.6 billion).
The N1.47tn expenditure represents more than 73% of what was incurred in the whole of last year, and is about 86%of what the country spent on petrol imports in the whole of 2019.
Kyari’s disclosure is one of the outcomes of the Petroleum Industry Act recently signed on the state-owned corporation in the global market.
Commenting on the impact of the PIA on the NNPC, he noted that the corporation would now be operated in line with the Companies and Allied Act.
The GMD however, expressed doubts about the NNPC’s ability to offer its shares to the public by 2022 or 2023 due to certain bottlenecks that had lingered over the years.
According to him, “We will be in the position to consider any IPO in three years’ time; that is the provision of the law.
“But when you want to get ready for IPO, you need to do things different. You need to get your books correct; you need to recapitalise; you need to shape your portfolio and many more things that you have to do until you get IPO ready.”
According to data obtained from the NBS, the sum of N782.46bn was spent on petrol imports in the second quarter of this year, up from the N687.74bn spent on the importation of the product in Q1.
The NBS data also showed that Nigeria spent N1.09tn on petrol imports in the first half of 2020, up from N766.06bn in H1 2019.
It further indicated that petrol topped the list of products imported into the country in Q2, accounting for 11.26 per cent of the total amount spent on imported products, up from 10.04 per cent in the previous quarter.
Nigeria, according to the NBS, spent N2.01tn on petrol imports in 2020, compared to N1.71tn in the previous year.