The National Petroleum Authority (NPA) in collaboration with the Upper East Regional PoliceCommand is to clamp down on illegal fuel trading at border towns and some fuel stations in the region.
The exercise targets curtailing activities like fuel smuggling, sale of adulterated fuel, operating with expired licence and without proper safety standards among others, which are rife in the area.
This was arrived at when the Chief Executive Officer of the NPA, Dr Mustapha Abdul-Hamid paid a courtesy call on the Upper East Regional Police Commander, DrSayibuPabiGariba, as part of a five-day familiarisation tour of the Northern regions.
The meeting discussed matters of mutual interest to both parties and how to advance operations of the NPA in the region, for national development.
Dr Abdul-Hamid expressed worry over the haphazard spring-up of fuel stations in the region and how some fuel station operators and employees threatened officials of the NPA during their routine monitoring exercises.
“The only thing we are worried about is that when people are in violation of the law, and I mean the fuel stations or according to the standards of NPA, a certain fuel station is not operating with proper safety standards or that their licences have expired or that their product have failed the quality test and they are locked up, the people forcibly break the seals and continue selling and sometimes they threaten our officers not to come here and lock their stations else be beaten to a pulp,” he said.
Dr Abdul-Hamid pleaded with the command to help provide the officials of the authority with security and quickly step in to investigate other illegalities and threatening occurrences to enable the NPA to discharge its duty in the national interest.
Dr Gariba, assured the NPA of the service’s support in providing security through “the various platforms to ensure the Upper East Region is peaceful and safe so that people can go about their mandate without any fear.”
He said his command had structured its operations in such a way that the filling stations and strategic storage were safe in the region.
“I assure you of the Police’s support that we are here to serve, and we can have a good collaboration with NPA to curb future occurrence of such illegalities. As I sit here, we are providing 24-hour security to some filling stations in Bawku because of the security situation there. All the filling stations we had intelligence that they could be a target of some attack we are providing some security,” he emphasized.
Earlier, the CEO and his entourage had visited some petroleum installations in the Bono and Ashanti regions.
BY TIMES REPORTER
