Dangote Refinery claims to sell fuel at N990/litre to trucks, says any imported petrol cheaper than that is substandard

Yakubu Suleiman, national assistant secretary of IPMAN, spoke in a television interview at the weekend.

“If Dangote has a product selling for N1,000, let’s assume, and there’s another place selling for N900, we can’t just say, for the sake of our relationship with Dangote, that we’ll instruct our members to buy there. We must go where the price is lower, where we’ll get profit,” he said.

In a statement signed by the company’s Group Chief Branding and Communications Officer, Anthony Chiejina, the Dangote refinery stated that it was also possible that the oil marketers who are pushing the narrative that products refined outside Nigeria are cheaper, are conniving with international traders to turn the country into a dumping ground for low quality products.

Specifically, the company stated that it had lately refrained from engaging in media fights, but was now constrained to respond to what it described as the recent ‘misinformation’ being circulated by the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), the Petroleum Products Retail Outlet Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN), among others.

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The statement read: “If anyone claims they can land PMS at a price cheaper than what we are selling, then they are importing substandard products and conniving with international traders to dump low quality products into the country, without concern for the health of Nigerians or the longevity of their vehicles.

“Unfortunately, the regulator (NMDPRA) does not even have laboratory facilities which can be used to detect substandard products when imported into the country.

“Post deregulation, NNPC set the pace by selling PMS to domestic marketers at N971 per litre for sale into ships and at N990 for sale into trucks.

“This set the benchmark for our pricing and we have even gone lower to sell at N960 per litre for sale into ships while maintaining N990 per litre for sale into trucks.

“In good faith, and in the interest of the country, we commenced sales at these prices without clarity on the exchange rate that we will use to pay for the crude purchased.

“At the same time, an international trading company has recently hired a depot facility next to the Dangote Refinery, with the objective of using it to blend substandard products that will be dumped into the market to compete with Dangote Refinery’s higher quality production.

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“This is detrimental to the growth of domestic refining in Nigeria. We should point out that it is unusual for countries to protect their domestic industries in order to provide jobs and grow economy.

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