GNPC overspends budget by 64 million dollars

The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation overspent its annual budget by about 64 million dollars in 2015, the 2015 Public Interest and Accountability Committee’s report has revealed.

A copy of the report seen by TV3, shows that GNPC’s budget allocation for the year under review was a little over 126 million dollars but the company spent 190,470,000 dollars to pay six month salary arrears of workers of the Saltpond Offshore Petroleum Company.

An amount of 1.81 million dollars was also spent on the maritime boundary dispute between Ghana and Ivory Coast as against 782,407 dollars spent in 2014 on the international arbitration.

The committee in its recommendations cautioned the GNPC to refrain from providing future guarantee’s to other state owned entities It also asked Parliament to ensure that the practice whereby GNPC will be requested to release parts of its allocations from petroleum receipts to government without prior approval from Parliament is discontinued.

Again, the Committee wants government to consider resuming its hedging programme on crude oil export to help mitigate the impacts of the volatility of crude oil prices on the world market following the successful hedging programmes implemented by Tullow and Kosmos.