National Council on Privatisation (NCP) on Friday approved the sale of 10 electricity distribution companies (DISCOs) and four generation companies (GENCOs).
The NCP is statutory chaired by Vice President Namadi Sambo. The companies slated for sale as part of the privatisation proceed also included the Enugu Disco that is being challenged in court.
The the preferred bidder for the Enugu Discos, Interstate consortium, failed to meet payment deadline. This prompted the reserve bidder, Eastern Electric, to go to court.
Interstate is owned by Emeka Offor while Prof Barth Nnaji is linked to Eastern Electric.
Mr Atedo Peterside, Chairman of the NCP Technical Sub-Committee, Atedo Peterside, said Council has referred the case of Sapele Genco to the Office of the Attorney-General and Ministry of Justice for advice.
“In today’s meeting we met largely to discuss the power sector transaction, about the PHCN DISCOS and GENCOS and the NCP ratified all the transactions except one and I will explain. For the DISCOS, the sales of the ten of them were to the preferred bidders and were ratified. I repeat the sale of the DISCOS to the preferred bidder was ratified.
“For the GENCOS, all the sales were ratified except for Sapele. In the case of Sapele, the preferred bidder has not paid in full for the asset as of today and so what the NCP decided was to refer the matter to the ministry of Justice and get the legal interpretation before coming back to take a final decision on Sapele because some legal issues were raised,” Mr. Peterside said.
Director-General of the Bureau for Pubic Enterprises (BPE), Benjamin Dikki, said bulk of the proceeds from the sales is being used for the payment of severance entitlements to about 49,000 workers of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), original owners of the Discos and Gencos.
Consequently, he said the Accountant-General of the Federation has been directed to go ahead with the payments. It is expected that the payment will be completed by September 27.
Dikki spoke further, “The NCP has given a clear directive to the accountant General but full payments of all entitlements of staff should be concluded early in the week, certainly between 23rd and 27th of Sept, every staff entitlements should be fully paid in order to facilitate a smooth handover.
“In the month of October, we are going to commence and conclude the handover of the enterprises to the private sector owners. We will announce the date when we will simultaneously handover the companies to all the 15 owners but 14 for now. 14 have paid and council has approved”.