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The Presidency said on Tuesday that reports of a missing N89.09 trillion purportedly stolen from stamp duty charges were untrue in response to controversy surrounding such assertions.
Additionally, it stated that deposits in Nigeria’s banking industry as a whole did not reach N89 trillion.
The consultants’ and petitioners’ assertions that N89tn from stamp duty was missing are now clearly incorrect and the product of their nefarious imaginations. The same group of specialists stated in 2016 that N20 trillion was uncollectible. It was discovered to be untrue. The total amount of deposits in the banking sector is not even close to N89 trillion.
In fact, if the federal government can locate N89 trillion Naira, it can pay off all of its debts, including those in foreign exchange and local currency, as well as all state government debts and still have over N10tn left,” a statement signed on Tuesday evening by the President’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, read.
Stamp duty: facts Nigerians need to know, read the message.
The lawmaker representing Jigawa State’s Kazaure, Roni, Gwiwa and Yankwashi Constituency in the lower chambers claimed last Friday in an interview with BBC Hausa that the Presidential Committee on the Reconciliation and Recovery of All Stamp Duties had accused some government agencies of undermining the committee’s efforts.
The committee discovered that N89.09 trillion had so far been realized via deductions by banks, but these had not made it to the FG’s coffers, according to Kazaure, who claimed to be the committee’s secretary.
The Central Bank of Nigeria, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, and the Protocol Department of the State House, he claimed, colluded to prevent him from informing President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) of the findings.
However, in response to the allegations on Tuesday, the Presidency stated that although the President had appointed a committee to look into recovering N20 trillion allegedly lost to the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System, he had since revoked his approval after learning of the committee’s actual plan.
It was revealed that this ‘anomaly’ appeared as a result of some individuals reportedly organizing a cartel with accomplices within the Nigerian Postal Service and stealing tokens from banking transactions.
Soon after, a non-governmental organization made the case to the government that the Nigerian government had lost more than N20 trillion to the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System in this regard between 2013 and 2016, asserting that the said amount could be recovered and paid back into the government coffers.
The consultants were put under the Secretary to the Government of the Federation’s oversight and requested payment of a professional fee of 7.5%.
“Following the lack of progress in the anticipated recovery, the late Abba Kyari, Chief of Staff to the President, wrote on March 8, 2018, to the SGF, transmitting a presidential direction that the operations of the consultants be stopped due to the lack of progress and several voiced concerns.
The consultants filed a lawsuit against the government as a result of this discharge. The government was subsequently vindicated by a court of competent jurisdiction, the Presidency noted in the statement.
It claimed that as a result of the dispute and the disagreement over who was legally responsible for collecting this fee, the regime changed the law and released NIPOST from the responsibility of doing so.
Shehu asserted that the fired employees went back to the drawing board to devise various intimidation tactics to use against the government, but the administration’s watchful teams managed to keep them at bay.
Recently, they returned to the government via Hon. Muhammadu Kazaure with a plan to find the allegedly lost stamp duties, with the former consultant serving as chairman and Hon. Gudaji serving as secretary.
“The President rescinded the approval he gave and asked that it be stopped from operating under his office’s seal,” Shehu continued. “When it emerged that the petitioner and lead consultant of the committee the President had dissolved via the late Abba Kyari’s letter of March 28 had disguised himself and re-emerged as the chairman of the new recovery committee championed by the Hon. Gudaji.
Vincent Paul
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