The Nigerian Senate has uncovered an alleged multi-billion Naira fraud in the joint venture operations between, the Nigerian Television Authority(NTA) and a Chinese Satellite Pay TV, StarTime.
The allegation came up when the Senate Joint Committee on Finance and National Planning scrutinized the spending and expenditure of the Nigerian Television Authority for 2021 with the details of the 2021-2023 MTEF & FSP documents.
The Chairman of the Joint Committees, Senator Adeola Solomon Olamilekan, ordered Mohammed to provide details of all revenue sources, including those from the StarTimes agreement.
“You have to include all joint ventures, which NTA has entered into, and debtors to NTA, including revenues generated through commercials and independent programmes.”
The NTA entered into the joint venture with StarTimes in 2010, with a sharing ratio of 70-30 in favour of the Beijing-based company.
Irked by NTA’s outing, the Senate Panel ordered that henceforth all revenue generating agencies of government should remit all their earnings into the Consolidated Revenue Funds, from which their cost of collection will then be given to them.
