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Power firms owe NERC N3bn

By on November 20, 2015

Power firms operating in the country owe the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission a total of N3bn, the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, NERC, Dr. Sam Amadi, has said.

According to him, the debt is due to revenue shortfalls and other challenges confronting operators in the Nigerian electricity supply industry, but noted that the commission was not in a haste to recover the funds.

This is coming as the chairman also said that the commission’s website and emails of its senior officials were hacked into on Monday by unknown persons.

Amadi said on Wednesday in Abuja at a press briefing organised by the commission to refute reports that NERC board members had proposed to share N2.7bn as severance benefit when they retired from service.

He said, “Today, the market is owing us N3bn. However, everybody in this market is owed money, including NERC, and this is because of the obvious things like shortfall, issues around revenue collection and all that.

“But we don’t want to be upfront asking to be paid, because as a regulator, we want to make sure that we fix some of those problems where the revenue shortfalls are coming from. So, the fact is that there is revenue shortfall everywhere.”

On the hacked website and emails, Amadi said the act was sophisticatedly perpetuated, adding that his personal email was used by the hackers to request for funds from the commission’s finance department.

He said, “On Monday, a faceless group claiming to be a vanguard of unemployed youths printed Tee-shirts, handbills and fez caps to protest against NERC commissioners stealing N2.7bn of taxpayers’ money and requesting the removal of the NERC commissioners. The same Monday, the NERC website was hacked into.

“This was a sophisticated operation to the extent that they generated an email from the chairman’s official email account to the commissioner for finance and management services asking him to transfer funds immediately to the chairman, who the hackers claimed was in the United Kingdom. The plan here is to generate an email trail to present to political authorities that the chairman and the commissioners at NERC are plotting to embezzle pubic funds at the twilight of their tenure.”
[Punch]