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The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) has sealed 26 filling stations in Ibadan for hoarding and selling petrol above the official N145 per litre pump price
Sadiq Danjuma Ibrahim, head of Operations DPR Ibadan office disclosed this on Tuesday while speaking with newsmen during a routine operation to check the level of compliance of fuel dealers
According to him, “Government has not increased fuel price, we cannot allow marketers to increase the price arbitarily”.
He said: “We are taking more drastic measures against erring filling stations, we are not only going to seal their stations, we will sanction them and have their operating licences revoked.
Danjuma noted that the marketers usually networked among themselves to evade sanctions whenever the operatives of DPR were out for monitoring .
Danjuma said Tuesday’s operation was limited to Ibadan and Oyo town but would be extended to other areas in Oyo and Osun states in the coming weeks.
“We are still going to other places. we have visited them before and we will surely revisit them and ensure that erring stations comply”
Some motorists and motorcycle riders who spoke to journalists regretted that life had been made difficult by petrol station owners who sold petrol as high as N180 per litre.
They hailed the DPR for their efforts and urged the agency to make the monitoring exercise a contnous one so that more filling stations would have no choice but to comply.