By Tabora Bojang
The managing director of the Gambia National Petroleum Corporation GNPC Baboucarr Njie, on Tuesday appeared before the National Assembly committee enquiring the importation and sale of fuel from a Russian oil ship, from which no tax was paid to the state among other suspected irregularities surrounding the deal.
The GNPC a national oil marketing company, is one of the OMC’s that bought the Russian oil.
In his testimony, Baboucarr Njie confirmed to the enquiry that his institution was notified by Gam Petroleum, the national storage depot, that there was a trader in the country that had petroleum to sell.
Njie explained that the company considers internal purchase of products as lifesaving “because there is a lot of hassle in sourcing foreign currency and so having somebody who has products in the country, it is a blessing.”
He said the GNPC was getting competitive pricing from Apogee, (the company selling the Russian oil) and for about eight months, they have been the principal responders anytime GNPC requested for quotations.
According to Mr Njie, Apogee had nominated an account where it instructed the GNPC to remit payments to.
At this point enquiry committee lead questioner Hon. Alhagie Mbow took him through the series of invoices available with the committee, showing that the names on the invoices are different from the names of the bank accounts where GNPC made its payments to.
Mbow took the witness through one of these invoices dated 10 January 2024 indicating the payment of $1.335 million by GNPC.
Mbow said although Apogee was reflected on the commercial invoice, the payment is made to Ecobank with an account named as Ultimate Beige Apogee FZC.
“I think that was an oversight,” MD Njie told the committee.
He was showed another commercial invoice dated 2October 2023 for the payment of $1.620 million but this was also paid to an Ecobank account named Ultimate Beige Apogee.
“So the invoice name and the name of the customer at Eco- bank are not the same,” Hon Mbow asked MD Njie.
He replied: “I think anybody would overlook the C and E and you won’t pay close attention. I would have corrected it if it was timely detected. For me, the most important thing was the name which was Apogee of course I know FZC is different from FZE.’’
Njie said the GNPC detected some of these inconsistencies in the first invoice sent by Apogee which was why they sent them a letter seeking for clarification before payment.
“The correction we sought from the very beginning was to ensure that the invoices that we are paying reflect Apogee because we are buying from Apogee. The bank has two identities, if the account name is Ultimate Beige even where the invoice says Apogee it would still be Ultimate Beige because the accounts number did not change from one transaction to the other. The clarification that we try to seek was to know if it is normal for us to make payments and the response, we got was that Ultimate Beige is the same as Apogee,’’ Mr Njie said.
