PAC body seeks special audit of training funds

Slams Petroleum Division for misuse of money by officials who spent it on foreign trips

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ISLAMABAD:

The chairman of the sub-committee of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has directed auditors to conduct a special audit of training funds amounting to millions of dollars to ascertain their alleged misuse.

The sub-committee met under the chairmanship of Convener Syed Naveed Qamar at the Parliament House.

The chairman lashed out at the Petroleum Division over the misuse of training funds. He said that officials spent the money on their trip to Rome with their wives while ignoring the plight of children living near oil and gas exploration fields.

The issue was taken up while discussing the audit para relating to the utilisation of training funds by Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL).

Auditors said that OGDCL had a training fund of $584,000 but it utilised only 5%. OGDCL Managing Director Ahmad Hayat Lak challenged the claim, saying that the company had disbursed half of the money to the DG petroleum concessions and utilised more than half of the funds on the local and external training of officials.

While discussing the audit para pertaining to strategic storages, Lak said that the storages helped the company to store oil at a time when Attock Refinery had shut down. He said that those storages were even used to store oil from other fields in the country. The sub-body settled almost all audit paras relating to OGDCL.

While discussing audit paras concerning Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC), sub-committee Chairman Naveed Qamar questioned the unaccounted-for-gas (UFG) benchmark set by the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (Ogra). He criticised the regulator for setting an unrealistic benchmark.

The auditors pointed out that SSGC had consistently faced a 17% UFG, which put a burden of Rs90 billion on consumers while causing another loss of Rs129 billion over the past few years.

SSGC Managing Director Amin Rajput clarified that the company had achieved a milestone by reducing the UFG in recent years, which stood at 10.56% in 2023-24 compared to 13% in the previous year.

He stressed that the company had been able to curtail the UFG level despite high losses in Balochistan where several cases of meter tempering were detected.

Regarding liquefied natural gas (LNG) swap, the MD said that the issue had been resolved between SSGC and Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) as both companies had signed a settlement agreement. SSGC has paid SNGPL Rs20 billion whereas the remaining Rs11 billion will be released in installments.