Revenue leakage: Senate summons finance minister, Emefiele, Magu

The Senate yesterday summoned the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning as well as heads of other agencies to brief it on the government’s framework to block revenue loss owing to money laundering, tax evasion and other criminal activities involving illicit financial flows.

Also summoned were the heads of the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related-offences Commission, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, the Nigerian Export-Import Bank, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, among others.

This followed a motion on “the Need to Review the

Domestic Legal Framework against Illicit Financial Flows and to Consider the Creation of a Tax Amnesty for the Voluntary Repatriation of Funds to Nigeria” by Senator Gershom Bassey. The Senate mandated its Committees on Finance, Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes; Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions to appraise the FIRS’ current framework for tracing, identifying, preventing and sanctioning cross-border tax evasion and other illicit financial outflows. It also mandated the committee to come up with a holistic legislative framework on how to repatriate lost revenue due to illicit financial flows, mitigate such future unabated flows and provide an efficiency strategy for the reinvestment of repatriated resources into the Nigerian economy.