Stamp Duty: Buhari govt once agreed to pay consultants N1.5 trillion to recover over N20 trillion

A member of the House of Representatives named Gudaji Kazaure accused various government departments of misusing Stamp Duty monies, but the Presidency has once more rejected his claims.

The claims are “baseless and misleading,” according to a statement made on Tuesday by Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity.

On Sunday, Mr. Shehu referred to Mr. Kazaure’s earlier assertion that he was the secretary of a committee formed by President Muhammadu Buhari to investigate problems with stamp duty collection as a fabrication of his imagination.

The president said in a statement on Tuesday night that Mr. Buhari took office in 2015 to discover that a legislation requiring the collection of a token on financial transactions already existed but was not being properly enforced.

The reason for this peculiarity is because some individuals allegedly organized a cartel with accomplices within the Nigerian Postal Service, or NIPOST, and were allegedly collecting and stealing this money.

Soon after, a non-governmental organization informed the administration that the Nigerian government had lost more than N20 trillion to the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS) in this regard between 2013 and 2016, asserting that the said amount could be recovered and paid back into the government coffers.

The consultants requested payment of a 7.5 percent professional fee and were assigned to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) for oversight. Abba Kyari, the late chief of staff to the president, wrote to the SGF on March 8, 2018, relaying a presidential direction that the operations of the consultants be halted in light of the lack of progress in the promised recovery and several raised concerns.

The statement said that after this dismissal, the consultants sued the government, and a court with appropriate jurisdiction later found in the government’s favor.

Credit: Premium Times