Members of the House of Representatives have summoned the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adeshina and others to come and explain what they know about an alleged N21 billion rice importation tax evasion scam.
According to Vanguard, the ministers will be joined by 25 rice importers to explain how tax was evaded despite the provision of subsidy to the importers by the Federal Government.
“The whole exercise was grossly abused by the importers and laced with fraud,” Vanguard quoted a source to have said concerning the issue.
“We’ll unravel those government officials who aided these economic saboteurs and ensure that all the tax they cornered is returned to government coffers.
“The adhoc committee set up by the House will also ensure that they are speedily prosecuted.”
“We’ve also discovered that those who got subsidy were the ones that even evaded tax more than those that did not get a dime from government,” the source added.
Also asked how the N21bn was arrived at, he said “that was a simple, it was from all the import duty transactions carried out by the importers”.
The source supplied that the Nigeria Customs Service was also summoned by the lawmakers so as to make all the necessary statistics available at the hearing tomorrow.
Anyone can see through this last minute plan by the reps to paint these two hardworking ministers in bad light. Why would they summon the Finance Minister and the Agric Minister when they have not even listened to the head of Customs?