A tax expert, Ali Nakyea, has called for the recovery of revenue reportedly lost by the country due to the non-repatriation of proceeds made on the export of about $2.3 billion worth of gold from Ghana.
He also called for those responsible for the loss of revenue to the country to be named and punished.
[contextly_sidebar id=”HbDvZyYBZulfrJ4QPgdsZEfPJRR4j51b”]The Daily Statesman Newspaper reported on Wednesday that proceeds from the almost two-and-half billion dollar exports were not repatriated, thus “enriching unscrupulous foreign gold dealers, mainly Indians and Chinese, and their Ghanaian collaborators” in the process.
The paper also alleged that officials in the Mahama administration under whose tenure the loss was incurred, had allowed the illegality because they were beneficiaries of the scam.
According to Ali Nakyea, anyone found to have been involved in the scam, should be sanctioned, and that efforts should be made to recover the lost funds.
“Illicit financial flow is not only the trade mis-pricing, bribery and corruption is also one. If you bring in items valued at one million and falsify the documents to read 300, 000, we are losing a tax element there. This is why the paperless system is welcome because you can’t falsify a document as there aren’t documents,” he said on the Citi Breakfast Show.
“We have to make sure that any person found culpable does not stay in there. I believe in finding where the loss is, recovering the money and punishing the person. We need to recover first before we punish. We should just name and shame. We need to name, recover and punish; and these three make it shameful.”
“The various causes of illicit financial flow, trade mis-pricing, bribery and corruption and transfer pricing, are areas we should pay attention to so that we get enough to ensure that our tax system works…If the report is now out, I will be interested in how they can follow up and make sure we receive these monies. If indeed the gold moved out then we should get the compensation and the payment. ”
‘Institutions should liaise’
Ali Nakyea expressed his frustration with the apparent lack of records detailing the country’s gold exports.
He insisted that Ghana may not have applied for a bailout from the IMF had the proceeds from the exports been repatriated, potentially making Ghana a net-creditor.
“I’m not surprised about the amount because it was published on the front page of the Daily Graphic that the Swiss Government indicated that they imported 20 billion cedis worth of gold from Ghana in 2016. My question at the time was, what is the record of receipt in Bank of Ghana and the record of export of gold with the Minerals Commission. We need to get these institutions to liaise and reconcile their figures,” he said.
“My other worry is, we have a trade attaché in our mission to Switzerland, what is he also checking and reporting back to us? Institutionally, we need to collaborate and check our records. If there are illicit flows, we’ll see clearly that with what we are losing, if accounted for, we don’t need to borrow. If we are going out for $938m over a three year period [from IMF] and we are losing billions in a year, then we [could have been] net creditors and we didn’t need to borrow.”
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By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana