As part of his mandate to sanitize the Nigeria Customs Service, the Comptroller-General Hameed Alli, has reiterated his desire to recover N20bn in unpaid tariffs from some rice importers.
Alli said this at a media briefing marking the end of his five-day working visit to Lagos.
“All lawful means will be explored to recover the money. No rice importer will go away with our money. We will explore all right channels to get it. We will even go to the extent of finding out how we got to this level. There will be no wishy-washy approach to it,” he said.
The NCS had in July sealed the warehouses and business premises of four major rice importing firms over N23.6bn unpaid rice duties and levies. The importers were the beneficiaries of the 2014 rice import quota policy, which specified a preferential duty rate of 10 per cent and levy of 20 per cent for their imports.
The companies: Olam, Stallion, Ebony Agro and Conti Agro were said to have imported in excess of 750,253.03 tonnes of rice, for which the NCS expected the payment of extant duty and levies.