The Presidency yesterday said a duly authorized committee under the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, was working to reconcile, recover and transfer all stamp duties into Stamp Duties Central Account,DailyTrust report.
A presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, disclosed this in a statement titled ‘Stamp Duty: Facts Nigerians Need to Know’.
His clarification followed the controversy over the purported trapped N89trn which started last Friday when the secretary of the dissolved Presidential Committee on Reconciliation and Recovery of Stamp Duties Revenue, Muhammadu Gudaji Kazaure, said President Buhari secretly constituted the committee and that he was being denied access to the president to provide progress report. Shehu said Buhari had not “completely ignored these matters.”
He said the work of the Malami committee “is ongoing, it is not finished yet and the president will continue to show his keen interest in the matter of stamp duty collection.” Shehu provided details on how the consultants lost in court after government discontinued the task to recover over N20trn purportedly lost to the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System between 2013-2016 following the lack of progress in the promised recovery.
He said they returned to the government through Hon. Muhammadu Gudaji Kazaure with a plan to track the so-called lost stamp duties with the erstwhile consultant as chairman and Hon. Gudaji as secretary.
He said 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 masqueraded himself and re-emerged as the chairman of the new recovery committee championed by Gudaji, the president rescinded the approval he gave and asked that it be stopped from operating under the seal of his office.
He said it was evident that the consultants and petitioners’ claims of a missing N89trn from stamp duty appeared false and a figment of their malicious imaginations. “Indeed, if the Federal Government can find N89trn, it can pay off all its debt, both foreign and local currency and all state government debts and still have over N10trn left.
“So, the claim by these so-called consultants and the disbanded committee is totally ridiculous and a complete mockery.
“Contrary to Hon. Kazaure’s assertion, the I&E window is not an “account” where foreign exchange is deposited. It is simply a platform for trading foreign exchange. As of April 2020, the total amount of foreign exchange traded (either bought or sold) in the window was about $171bn. The size of this amount suggests that there is adequate liquidity or availability of foreign exchange and that anyone who wants to buy or sell would easily find a counterparty to trade with. The amount does not mean that we have $171bn stacked away in some vault or saved in any account.”
