A vexed finance minister in Nigeria once observed that three government departments each had widely varying estimates for how much oil was being produced in the country, a critical flaw for a nation that depends on oil for almost all of its hard currency.
She might have added that all three estimates were wrong, because a good portion of the nation’s output is siphoned off pipelines or tapped from abandoned well heads by smugglers before anyone has had a chance to measure it.
In Venezuela, I remember a well publicised but ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit alleging that the brother of the head of the national oil company had hived away millions of barrels of crude oil in a storage tank on the shores of Lake Maracaibo by tampering with the meters at nearby fields.
No comments:
Post a Comment