Abuja - Finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said on Thursday she had ordered a slow down to fuel subsidy payments to allow verification that they are for genuine deliveries, an effort to combat fraud costing it billions of dollars.
"I decided that we should slow down the payments until we verify ... that what we are paying is really being paid for genuine product delivered, to avoid the mistakes we made in the past," Okonjo-Iweala told a news conference.
Accountant-General Jonah Otunla, also at the conference, said the government had spent 1.44 trillion Nigerian naira ($8.83 billion) in the first half of 2012, of which 1.036 trillion was on recurrent expenditure, the largest component of which is the fuel subsidy.
Reuters
