The Ship Owners Association of Nigeria (SOAN), on Thursday, revealed that it has expelled one of its members, Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd, over failure to refund the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) monies received as payment for sea experience services.
Recall that in an earlier interview, the Rector of the Academy, Commodore Duja Effedua, had revealed that Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd collected money from the Academy to provide sea experience services to cadets of the school, but failed to provide such services and also did not refund the money like some other indigenous shipowners.
Reacting to the interview, the President of SOAN, Dr Mkgeorge Onyung, explained that Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd had been expelled from the association after all efforts failed to make the company see the reason why the money should be refunded.
According to Dr Mkgeorge Onyung, “In as much as I won’t like to join issues with the Rector over this matter, it is important that everybody knows that SOAN as a body did everything possible to make Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd refund the Academy.
“The Academy entered into an agreement with individual shipowners who are members of SOAN to provide sea experience opportunity for cadets of the Academy. SOAN as a body did not collect money from the Academy, it was an agreement entered into individually with shipowners who are SOAN members. So, because a member of SOAN refused to refund money collected from the Academy for sea experience services, does that make every member of SOAN bad? No.
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“For example, if a student or some students of the Academy goes against the law of the school, does it make all the cadets of the school bad? No. So, for the Rector to categorise the whole of SOAN over the misdeed of one member is wrong.
“The SOAN leadership has been very cooperative with the Academy over this issue. What we have done is that we have expelled the erring member over this issue.
“The man has been expelled from SOAN and will only be re-admitted after he rectifies this issue because he is a shipowner. It is just unfortunate that the Rector said he is not going to deal with SOAN again because of this issue.”
In an interview granted after the 2021 Graduation ceremony of the Academy, Commodore Duja Effedua had revealed that the school had to drag Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd to court over refusal to refund the Academy.
“The truth is that I am no more interested in that agreement with SOAN. I had good intentions and we started well, but one company, Oil Flow Nigeria Limited decided to defraud the Academy.
“The company took money but did not provide the required sea experience as stated in the agreement. Rather than refund the money like others who couldn’t meet up with the agreement, Oil Flow Nigeria Ltd chose to go to court.
“I am so disappointed because the owner of that company has children. Why would you deprive the children of other Nigerians opportunity for progress in life? Some companies collected money from us, but because they had a very busy schedule and there was no space to train our cadets, they returned the money.
“Oil Flow was tossing us up and down. They will ask us to come to Lagos, we will be in Lagos, and then they will say we should come to Port Harcourt. At a point, we had to ask them to give us our money because the siwes programme which was for four months was already over. We had to take the company to court and the case is still in court as we speak,” Commodore Duja Effedua had stated while speaking with selected maritime journalists in Oron, Akwa Ibom State.
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