NBET Exposed: ₦259m Unrecovered, $69.3m Power Debt, Missing Vehicles as Agency Operated Without Audited Accounts

Secrets Reporters

A confidential dossier obtained exclusively by SecretsReporters has exposed deep financial irregularities at the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company in Abuja, the sole legal wholesale buyer of electricity in the country’s power market. The internal findings, covering transactions and omissions that remained unresolved into late 2020, paint a picture of systemic failures in accountability that left hundreds of millions of naira and tens of millions of dollars unrecovered while the agency itself operated without audited accounts for three consecutive years.

Between 2017 and 2019, NBET failed to submit any audited financial statements. The absence of these foundational documents left oversight bodies without the basic tools needed to scrutinise spending or performance. By October 2020 the gap had still not been closed.

Management later indicated that an external firm had been engaged after necessary clearances, yet the outstanding statements remained outstanding at the time the records were compiled. The practical consequence was a prolonged period in which governance decisions at a critical national institution proceeded without the discipline of independent verification.

Far more concrete losses appear in the treatment of staff loans. In July 2016 seven officers received revolving mortgage facilities totalling ₦236,440,927.81. In January 2018 a Managing Director was granted a further ₦85,283,867.36. When that Managing Director left service in July 2020 only ₦35,707,541.90 had been repaid, leaving ₦49,576,325.48 outstanding.

The seven other officers exited with a combined unpaid balance of ₦138,783,511.67. Altogether ₦188,359,837.15 in public funds simply walked out the door with the departing staff. No recovery had been effected and no satisfactory explanation for allowing the officers to disengage while still indebted had been recorded.

An even larger sum sits across the border. From January 2015 NBET supplied electricity to two firms operating in Benin Republic. By January 2019 the cumulative value of that power reached US$315,408,623.07, of which only US$246,023,923.87 had been paid. The unpaid balance stood at US$69,384,699.20, approximately ₦25.2 billion at the then prevailing exchange rate.

Despite contractual interest provisions, documented recovery efforts were absent. Internal correspondence later revealed a jurisdictional dispute between NBET and the Transmission Company of Nigeria over who bore responsibility for collecting the money in the regional market, with each side pointing to the other while the debt continued to grow.

Physical assets fared no better. During an October 2020 inspection four company vehicles, among them a 2014 Toyota Land Cruiser and a 2019 BMW 530i, could not be located. Evidence indicated that two former Managing Directors had taken the vehicles without formal allocation. Management’s subsequent observation that the officers’ outstanding indebtedness exceeded their severance packages did nothing to restore the missing assets to the government fleet.

Finally, in 2019 the agency awarded sixty-six contracts from which the mandatory one-per-cent stamp duty was never deducted. Contractors were overpaid by ₦7,024,002.13. Demand letters were eventually issued, but recovery had not materialised by the time the records were examined.

Taken together, the failures leave NBET with unresolved liabilities approaching ₦259 million in domestic currency plus more than US$69 million in cross-border electricity debt. At an institution charged with stabilising Nigeria’s power market, the combination of missing accounts, unrecovered loans, vanished vehicles and uncollected foreign receivables raises questions that go beyond ordinary administrative oversight. SecretsReporters’ exclusive access to the dossier shows an organisation that for years operated with incomplete books, incomplete recovery of public funds and incomplete control over its own assets.