Sanusi Lamido Sanusi assured me that only three people knew of this letter-himself, myself, and the President. But I was skeptical. I asked if he had typed the letter himself, and he said no, so other pcople had handled the information and were in the know. I was sure the letter would leak to the press very soon. I was also surprised that the President had not mentioned the letter to me and resolved to ask him about it the next morning.

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At an early morning meeting, the President acknowledged that the Central Bank Governor had indeed sent him such a letter. He said he was astonished at the amount and asked if Lamido had discussed the matter with me beforehand. I said no. When the President asked my opinion about the unaccounted-for amount, I gave him the same answer I had given Lamido the night before-that the Finance Ministry estimate was in the range of $10.8 billion to $12 billion. The President then said that he found the situation troubling and wondered if it was related to an ongoing investigation with the Gover nor that I had not been aware of. He said that the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a financial oversight body located in the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Investment, had drawn the President's attention to irregularities in the 2013 internal accounts of the Central Bank. The
President sent the FRC's queries to the Central Bank Governor for action, and Lamido had sent the accounts back with full responses to all the questions raised, but this was still not acceptable to the FRC. According to the President, if the situation became public, it could reflect badly on the Central Bank Governor. So the President wondered whether the letter on missing oil-sector revenues was a way to divert attention from the ongoing situation and get the matter dismissed. I was quite surprised at this narrative, as this was the first time I had heard about alleged irregularities in the Central Bank accounts. The President felt that I should convene a meeting with representatives of the Central Bank, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, and the Finance Ministry to discuss the Central Bank Governor's concernas and reconcile figures between the three agencies.

Later that day, I called Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and told him I had spoken to the President, who asked for a reconciliation of numbers by the three agencies. He readily accepted. I also spoke to the Minister of Petroleum Resources, who said that her ministry was ready to participate. I formed a technical task force made up of senior people from the three agencies and headed by the Director General of the Budget Office, Dr. Bright Okogu, a petroleum economist and experienced macroeconomist who had worked at both the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The task force was to look at all the evidence on sums that were unaccounted for among the funds that the NNPC should have disbursed to the Federation Account during the period in question, and reconcile all numbers from the three agencies. The task. The atmosphere was very tense and antagonistic between NNPC and Ministry of Petroleum Resources officials and those of the Central Bank, with the former feeling that this letter by the Governor could only have been written to discredit them and accuse them of corruption. The Finance Ministry was in the middle. We felt that our job was to manage the situation such that we could get numbers we all more importantly, perhaps this exercise could lead to the Finance Ministry recovering unaccounted-for monies. Whatever the unaccounted for amount was, I was interested in moving the monies into the Federation Account to ease the pressure on federal, state, and force was given one week to do this work. local government budgets.