Chairman of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise and Tariff investigating activities of the Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, Hope Uzodinma has opened up on reports questioning his involvement in the probe.
Uzodinma is facing a groundswell of reports that he is using the Senate platform to advance the interest of a company he is linked to especially Niger Global as Newsdiaryonline has reported.
A respected former governor of Kaduna State,Colonel Abubakar Umar (rtd) has also slammed the senate over some unwholesome deals.
But in his reaction to the series of reports,Uzodinma told Thisday newspaper that the Senate is not investigating Calabar Channel dredging.He also expressed his respects for Colonel Umar while urging him to investigate the matter a little further.
Actually Uzodinma in a telephone chat with Thisday responded to Colonel Umar’s criticism as reported thus: “I have a lot of respect for Col. Umar. He is a man I have always read his views, I see him as a nationalist and statesman. I believe that before he arrived at a position he took today, he should have done some investigations as to the merit of the issues on ground. I am the chairman of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise and Tariff.
“The company in question wrote a petition to our committee that they imported rice and they paid the duties, the supposed duties as issued by customs, and yet when the rice came in, the Customs seized the containers and the man is from my constituency, and what I did was that I took the petition and we deliberated at the committee and agreed that it should be forwarded to the customs and I did a forwarding letter.
“If you looked at the letter, what we said was that we received a petition from this company alleging maltreatment, we implore you to look at the merit of their statements or otherwise and deploy your internal mechanisms to resolving issues like this as you deem appropriate. This was just exactly what we wrote in the letter to CG customs. I still have a copy of the letter, I still have a copy of the reply from the Nigerian customs service. I have not seen anywhere in that letter we directed that any cargo be released. I though that a statesman who read what had been happening in the past few days should have at least taken a phone and spoken with any of the committee members or even Col. Hamid Ali. That I am sure was not done.”
Speaking on the issue of Calabar Channel, Uzodinma said,“We are not investigating Calabar Channel dredging. Anybody who knows me, knows that I came from the private sector to join politics. An MD of NPA is talking of a dredging concession that happened in 2004. 2004 for Christ sake!. I wasn’t a senator, I was only chairman of Niger Global. 2004 to today is 13 years. We are not even investigating NPA on Calabar dredging.
“We are investigating infractions in the import-export cycle, where vessels are coming into Nigeria and government is not collecting money and the vessels are going back after they have offloaded the vessels.
“We have identified some vessels with some identification numbers confirmed to have come into Nigeria and left without paying customs duties, without paying terminal charges; all the funds that were supposed to accrue to the federal government were not collected. We simply forwarded these particulars to the managing director of NPA to come and tell us what happened.
“We have invited her four times. The first time she did not come, the second time she sent ED to represent her. We delivered the documents to the ED, we delivered document to the Shippers’ Council, the Council has worked on the documents and came back to us with some confirmation. What is wrong in inviting the managing director of NPA to appear before Senate committee to explain why revenues that were supposed to accrue to government did not accrue?”
