The Federal Government of Nigeria has threatened to impose punitive sanctions on fuel stations or depots selling petrol above the official price of N165 per litre.
The threat comes on the heels of the recent fuel scarcity witnessed in the FCT and its environs as well as other regions in the country.
The authority chief executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), Farouk Ahmed, issued the warning on Monday during a joint inspection of fuel stations in Abuja carried out in collaboration with top officials of the Nigerian Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Petroleum Pipeline and Marketing Company (PPMC) and the NMDPRA.
According to Ahmed, the inspection was intended to enforce the regulations by following up on warnings given to oil marketing companies, especially those selling above the official price of N148.
“We are actually trying to monitor the dispensing to ensure that all the stations with petrol are dispensing all their trucks to reduce the long queues and ensure efficiency in service. We are monitoring the depot sales also, checking the number of trucks that are loaded; this is a serious fact which we look at,” he explained.
President Buhari had recently approved the upward review in the freight rate of oil transporters to lessen the challenges facing petrol distributions nationwide. The revised freight rate of petrol took off June 1 and maintained the current regulated pump price of N165 per litre.
He explained that the president raised the freight rate of transporters from N10.46 to N20.46, in a bid to enable transporters to transport petroleum products across the country without losing revenue which they had complained about.
