Audit of Nigeria's NNPC shows it overpaid state, but still owes-By Felix Onuah

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Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan (C) and wife waves to people in the queue waiting to cast their …

By Felix Onuah

ABUJA (Reuters) - A forensic audit of Nigeria's state oil firm released on Monday said the company, accused of corruption, actually overpaid the state by almost $750 million, but should still pay it an additional $1.5 billion.
Outgoing Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan released the audit days after his elected replacement, Muhammadu Buhari, pledged to issue the report and crack down on corruption in the energy company once in office.
The probe of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation's (NNPC) books was instituted last year after former central bank governor Lamido Sanusi said the firm had withheld $20 billion in oil revenue from government coffers, jeopardising the country's finances.
Details in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers audit said NNPC actually overpaid by $0.74 billion in the period between January 2012 to July 2013, after remitting $50.81 billion to federation accounts of the $69.34 billion it had received.
The balance of $18.53 billion was accounted for through various operational costs, unremitted revenues by a subsidiary and gasoline and kerosene subsidies, it said.
Sanusi had told a Senate committee in 2014 that NNPC had received $67 billion and handed over only $47 billion.
After the allegations, Jonathan publicly dismissed the claim and replaced Sanusi, saying the banker had mismanaged the central bank's budget. Sanusi has since become Emir of Kano, the country's second-highest Islamic authority.
The PwC audit, however, said NNPC and its upstream subsidiary, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, should hand over $1.48 billion arising from unsubstantiated costs, duplicated subsidy claims and computation errors.
The report also recommended an overhaul of how NNPC is run.

"The NNPC model of operation must be urgently reviewed and restructured, as the current model which has been in operation since the creation of the corporation cannot be sustained," it said in the 200-page document.

An earlier one-page version of the report, which had been due out in September, was released in February.

The affair has caused consternation in a nation long accustomed to reports of grand graft in Africa's largest oil producer.

Analysts say Buhari, 72, managed to oust Jonathan in elections last month because voters believed he would tackle graft in Africa's largest economy.

Culled from Reuters in  Yahoo Finance

Money Minute: 5 ways wedding guests can save money and stay sane-By Mandi Woodruff

Forget the bride and groom -- weddings can be expensive for guests, too! The average wedding guest will shell out nearly $700 to see their loved ones walk down the aisle, according to the latest data from American Express.

Finding the right gift is only half the budget battle. Here are a few tips to help you save as a wedding guest.
1. If you were too late to lock in the group hotel rate, you might still have options. Get at least 10 people together and you can try reserving your own block at a discount. Or try booking a group through sites like Priceline or Hotelplanner.com. Or, skip the hotel and get a rental from Airbnb or HomeAway.com. The average hotel rate for wedding guests is about $170 a night, so use that as a good baseline when hunting down deals.
2. All those pre-wedding festivities can really add up. You’ve got engagement parties... bridal showers...bachelor parties in Vegas...ugh! Listen -- If you aren’t super close to the bride and groom, skip one (or all) of these events and save your money. No one will hold it against you.
3. Airfare is hands down the biggest expense for wedding guests, costing an average $225. The best time to buy flights for weddings is six weeks before the big day, so as soon as you get your invite, put a reminder on your calendar. Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings are the best. If you’re flying internationally, start looking for deals five to six months out.
4. Stick to the registry and buy your gift early -- people always go for the cheap stuff first!
5. Nothing to wear to the nuptials? Try renting your dress or suit instead of buying something new you might only wear a couple of times.

 Culled from Yahoo Finance

This retirement investing tool might actually be working-By Ben Steverman

For a decade, a new kind of mutual fund has been taking over Americans’ retirement portfolios.

The target-date fund is designed for people with no knowledge of investing. You pick the fund closest to the year you expect to retire—the Vanguard Target Retirement 2030, for example—and the fund does the rest. Containing a variety of stock and bond funds, the all-in-one funds gradually and automatically get less risky as retirement approaches.
There’s now evidence that target-date funds may be working. They’re giving investors solid returns, data from research firm Morningstar show. Just as importantly, they're boosting those returns by protecting investors from their worst instincts.

Good thing, because the retirements of millions of Americans, and especially young people, now rely on target-date funds.
This year, for the first time, more than half of all 401(k) contributions will go into target-date funds, research firm Cerulli Associates estimates. It projects the assets in target-date funds to hit $2 trillion by 2019, when 88 percent of all 401(k) contributions will go into the funds.
With 10 years of history, there’s now enough of a track record to judge just how well investors are doing in target-date funds. The average per-year return over the past decade was 5 percent, Morningstar estimates. That’s about what you would expect from funds that are a blend of stock and bond funds. Stock funds were up an annual 7.5 percent over the past decade, while bond funds were up an average 4.4 percent.

But target-date funds have one big advantage over other kinds of mutual funds, the data show. The average mutual fund has a flaw, which is that the average investor hardly ever does as well as his or her funds. Investors tend to jump in and out of funds at the wrong time. They buy high, choosing funds only after they've done well. And they sell low, dumping underperforming funds just as they’re about to take off. Picture an investor buying into a tech fund at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000 and then selling a few years later just before the sector revived along with such stocks as Google and Apple.
Investors in target-date funds, at least so far, seem to have avoided this curse. They’ve been sticking with their funds and doing surprisingly well in the process.
On average, target-date fund investors are doing 1.1 percent better per year than their funds. Investors in almost every other fund category lagged their funds over the past decade, including a -0.98 percent underperformance for U.S. equity funds and -1.3 percent for municipal bond funds.

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Does this vindicate target-date funds? Not so fast. It’s possible the performance of target-date investors is a historical accident, caused by the funds’ growing popularity during a six-year bull market for stocks. The next time markets hit 2008-style turbulence, these investors may bail out of target-date funds, selling at the wrong time just as they panicked over their stock funds six years ago.
Another worry about target-date funds is their fees. Target-date funds charged investors 0.78 percent in fees last year, Morningstar says. That’s down from an expense ratio of 1.04 percent in 2008. But it’s still a drag on performance, with some investors paying three or four times more than others. Vanguard’s target-date funds charge 0.17 percent per year, and new funds from State Street and Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco) charge less than 0.3 percent. But meanwhile, more than a dozen target-date fund series still charge 1 percent or even higher.
Target-date funds may prove to be a valuable tool, but only at a reasonable price.

Culled from Bloomberg.com