Oil payments fall to $14bn

Payments to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and other National Oil companies (NOCs) fall 24% in 2015 on pull back from Nigeria, Bloomberg has reported.
According to the media outfit, Trafigura is the only major oil trader to disclose information.
It said Trafigura Group disclosed $14.2 billion in payments to Nigeria and other governments in 2015, a 24 percent drop from the year before, as lower oil prices and sharply curtailed business with the NNPC reduced spending.

It said: “For the first time, the figure included payments to all countries where the trading house does business, and not just those that are members of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), a voluntary disclosure standard seeking to publish payments made by resource companies to governments in an effort to root out corruption.
“Trafigura is the only major trader that has disclosed how much it pays governments for oil purchases. After joining the EITI initiative in 2015, it urged other trading houses including Vitol Group, Glencore Plc, Gunvor Group and the in-house trading arms of major producers such as BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc to follow suit in disclosing their oil-trading related government payments. None have.
Trafigura said it purchased $915 million of oil or petroleum products in 2015 from EITI members countries, a 70 percent drop from the $3 billion paid the year before.
It said that was mostly because the volume of crude swapped for oil products with the NNPC fell to about 844,200 barrels in 2015 from about 38 million barrels the year before.
Trafigura also revealed payments to non-EITI countries of $12.7 billion in 2015, down from $14.9 billion in 2014.
The report quoted Trafigura Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Weir, as saying decision to disclose the aggregate total of payments to non-EITI countries “provides further context and demonstrates the challenge ahead in broadening existing EITI coverage.”