Hameed Ali: Nigeria Customs in Trouble With House of Reps Over Auctioning of Seized Goods

The troubles of the Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Hameed Ali are not over.

Following his squabble with the Nigerian senate, the House of Representatives has ordered an investigation into the activities of the agency. 

The House on Thursday in Abuja mandated its Committee on Customs and Excise to investigate the failure of the agency to auction confiscated goods.

This followed the adoption of a motion on the “Need to Investigate the Failure of the Nigerian Customs Service to Auction Confiscated Goods’’.

The sponsor of the motion, Rep. Prestige Ossy (Abia-PDP) said that ban on the auction of goods seized by the NCS had resulted to the forfeiture of such goods to the Federal Government.

He said “most of these goods, especially the vehicles with Duty Paid Value (DPV) worth over N6 billion, are rapidly depreciating .

“The Customs service will eventually spend huge amount of money in disposing them when it ought to have generated huge revenue for the government by auctioning them before they wither away,’’ he said.

Ossy said that the service had announced the establishment of an auction sale website in 2015, but said two years on, the website had not materialised.

“The failure to auction goods in its custody had denied the Federal Government over N1 trillion which ought to accrue to it from the auctioning of those goods,’’ he said.