The Federal Operations Unit (FOU) Zone ‘A’ of the Nigeria Customs Service in Ikeja, Lagos has busted a warehouse at the Oshodi area of Lagos and confiscated bales of textile materials. The unit consequently vowed to raid warehouses and facilities where suspected smuggled items are held.
Addressing newsmen on the recent performance of the unit last Friday, Acting Controller Turaki Usman said that following a tip-off, the customs operatives evacuated seven trucks of jumbo bales of textile materials from a warehouse in the Oshodi area of Lagos state.
The Federal Operations Unit (FOU) Zone ‘A’ of the Nigeria Customs Service in Ikeja, Lagos has busted a warehouse at the Oshodi area of Lagos and confiscated bales of textile materials. The unit consequently vowed to raid warehouses and facilities where suspected smuggled items are held.
Addressing newsmen on the recent performance of the unit last Friday, Acting Controller Turaki Usman said that following a tip-off, the customs operatives evacuated seven trucks of jumbo bales of textile materials from a warehouse in the Oshodi area of Lagos state.
Turaki equally said that the unit had previously intercepted 50 exotic customized cars comprising of Rolls Royce, Infinity jeeps, Honda Pilot jeeps, Maybach, Land Cruiser, Tundra, Jagua 350 among others from vehicle shops and other points in Lagos.
The vehicles according to the FOU Customs boss, do not have clearance documents, while some of them were wrongly declared.
Turaki told newsmen that the value of the textiles cannot be ascertained yet, even as he said that the service is still trying to investigate and find out the owners of the warehouse. Meanwhile, duty payable on some of the vehicles so far intercepted is placed at N14million each.
"These are high valued vehicles that if duty is paid on them, obviously the Federal Government will make a lot of money, none of them will pay less than N14million, they are not ordinary cars they are customized and are brand new cars of 2014, but they were declared as used vehicles and what was paid on some of them was N1million"
"But if you go by their value and what is expected to be collected from them, none of them is to pay less than N14million each, going by the current rate of duty, our officers brought them and we profiled their document. Where we don't have papers, it is very difficult to ascertain the point of entry, so at the end of the day they are considered as smuggled", he explained.
He confirmed that the owners of the vehicle will be given an opportunity to pay their duty and take back their cars, even as he confirmed that some of the cars have already paid duty to the tune of 28million and have subsequently been cleared and released.
Turaki also revealed that customs has taken delivery of armored vehicles which will be deployed to comb various nooks and crannies under the zone from where rice are being smuggled into Nigeria. According to him, rice no longer comes in through the land borders but through the creeks.
"These creeks, some of them are just at the backyard of neighborhoods which is very dangerous for both the smugglers and the officers, but by the time we get more equipment, we will track them" he assured.
Apart from these, the unit also on Monday July 28th 2014 along Lagos-Abeokuta expressway intercepted two flat bed trucks carrying 1, 200 bags of rice with Duty Paid Value (DPV) of N10.2Million. The product was covered with tarpaulin coated with cement dust ostensibly to divert attention.
Turaki said that between 13th July and 9th August, the unit recorded a total of 336 different seizures of assorted offending goods valued at N107, 513, 308. 00 with Duty Paid Value of N150, 450, 418.00.
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