House Resolution 79, moved on 8 January 2012 in the immediate aftermath of the Occupy Nigeria protests against the 1 January 2012 petrol-subsidy removal, established an ad-hoc committee under Hon. Farouk Lawan (PDP, Kano) and Hon. Emmanuel Jime to investigate the management of the Petroleum Support Fund (PSF) from 2009 to 2011. The committee reported on 18 April 2012 (the 'Lawan Report'). Its central findings were: (i) ₦2.587 trillion was paid out under the PSF over the three years, against an appropriated envelope of ₦245 billion — a 956% overshoot; (ii) ₦1.067 trillion was paid in 2011 alone, of which the committee could not verify delivery of approximately ₦1.07 trillion (the headline figure was later restated, including subsidy-on-kerosene anomalies, at ₦1.7 trillion); (iii) the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) and the NNPC processed claims without functioning verification controls; and (iv) 72 marketing companies — including several with no operational depots, vessels or filling stations — were named for refund.
The report was adopted by the House on 24 April 2012. No major prosecutions resulted. Hon. Lawan himself was suspended from the House in June 2012 and later convicted of bribery (Femi Otedola sting operation, FCT High Court, 22 June 2021, Angela Otaluka J., 7-year sentence — overturned in part on appeal). The PSF was nominally subsumed into the under-recovery accounting of the NNPC; the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 abolished it formally. Subsidy payments resumed in 2015–22 under different mechanisms and were finally removed by President Tinubu on 29 May 2023.