The Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO) says it is working closely with anti corruption agencies to ensure illicit funds are not invested into the mining sector.
Mr Obadiah Nkom, the Director-General of NMCO made this known on Thursday in Abuja.
According to Nkom, the ministry is working with the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) among others to ensure no investor invest illicit fund into the mining business.
He said one of the conditions to accept an investor to become a mineral title holder was to have a legal attestation of no conviction.
“A mining title holders must have a legal attestation that he or she is free of conviction and this will be done in writing and recorded for future purpose and for transparency.
“We are working closely with Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, EFCC among others to know beneficiary of mineral titles because some don’t have their real name on their titles.
“We make sure we know the mineral title holders beneficiary for the sake transparency, corruption free which is an international procedure.
However, he said that NMCO had recently published no fewer than 4000 mineral title holders that defaulted over non payment of service charge, not using their mineral titles among others.
He said that the law indicated that NMCO should write to the address given by the mineral title holders with acknowledgement and gazette the notification for future references.
“We even published their names on Newspapers, sent them sms for enough notification; some complied with the notification within the 30 days ultimatum given by the mining law while some did not respond.
” We have revoked the licences of those that did not respond and we believe that the sector should be able to bring In more investors,” he said.
Nkom said that the agency applied its principle of ‘Use-it-or Lose-it’ on mineral title holders that refused to use their licences for years.
” We don’t want mining investor to obtain a licence from NMCO and refuse to use it, depriving other investors to take the advantage of that areas.”
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” Some investors hold firm to mineral titles, pay their statutory fees as required but that is not enough, not puting those titles to work contravenes the provision of the Act because they are dormant.”
