Officials of the Federal Ministry of Trade and Investment on Wednesday sealed five filling stations in Ogun over alleged sharp practices.
The affected stations included an NNPC Mega station on the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway at Ifo, EMIMP Petroleum, Vitality Oil and Gas, NIPCO and Conoil filling stations located in Sango area of the state.
The Head of the Department of Weights and Measures of the ministry’s monitoring team, Mohammed Sadasidi, told newsmen after the exercise that the filling stations were discovered to be under dispensing petroleum products to customers.
He said that the dispensing pumps of the filling stations had been reduced by between 2.75 litres and 2.95 litres from every 20 litres of petrol sold to customers.
“After checking the metres with our own Seraphin Test Measure, we found out that in every 20 litres they sold, they only dispensed between 17 litres and 18 litres in some of the stations,” he said.
Sadasidi stated that the defaulters, whose dispensing pumps were not within the tolerable error, had been invited to Abuja for explanation, adding that they would be prosecuted if they were unable to give convincing reasons for their actions.
Sadasidi said the inspection was meant to ensure that marketers exhibited integrity, fairness and accuracy while dispensing fuel to customers.
“We also want to protect consumers by ensuring that they always get the right measure or quantity for their money. It is extremely disappointing that motorists are being short changed.
“We will not, however, relent in our official duty to ensure that proper things are done. We have won one of such cases last week as announced by the Federal High Court in Lokoja. Others are in progress and we are definitely going to prosecute more defaulters until they conform to laid down rules,” he said.
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