The House of Representatives has threatened to issue a warrant of arrest on Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of banks that would fail to honour invitation over the $30 billion annual revenue loss due to non-remittance of statutory revenues to the Federal Government by banks, oil companies and other institutions.
Chairman of the house joint committee on finance and banking & currency, Abiodun Faleke issued the threat on Monday at the opening of the investigative hearing into the alleged over $30 billion annual revenue leakage between 2010 and 2019 with the view to identifying and plugging revenue leakages.
The house had on March 5, 2020 resolved to investigate the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) over alleged racketeering in the allocation of foreign exchange to companies and directed its committees on finance and banking & currency to “conduct public hearing and look into the various originating documents maintained by the CBN, banks, forex dealers, FIRS, importers and other beneficiary companies.
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According to the joint committee, the investigative hearing covers: oil revenue, payments on accounts of foreign currency denominated contracts by companies in exploration, engineering, procurement, construction, marine transportations and foreigners exchange allocations to companies from sources such as CBN, autonomous, interbank, and over the counter purchases for the importation, payments of foreign service vendors, dividend repatriation, foreign loan/interest payments, equity, government securities in money market, treasury bills, among others.
Faleke stated that the investigative hearing was not to witch-hunt but to assist Nigeria come out of its financial woes.
He said: “We are very sure that Nigeria has enough resources within its system if every player in the economic sector plays by the rules. What we mean by this is that let everybody pay the taxes that the organisations or individuals are due to pay.
“We have records to show that Nigeria is losing over $30 billion every year to malpractice, evasion of taxes legally due to the government. It was based on that, that the motion was moved for investigation to be done and letters have been written to banks in the first instance before we move to the next stage. We expect responses from the banks, some have submitted documents, partial documents, some have not submitted at all.
He said the committee expected the affected people to cooperate with the houses, adding that “every day in the next weeks, months we would be sitting here to look at these issues”.
Declaring the investigative hearing open, the speaker of the house, Femi Gbajabiamila said that Nigeria was facing hard times as a result of the crash in the price of crude oil and global economic slowdown. He reiterated the resolve of the house to block all revenue leakages through legislative action.
