Intercontinental Hotels risks forceful closure by Customs over rice import debt

The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) said it may be forced to shut-down the famous Intercontinental Hotels Lagos, following the alleged refusal of the hotel’s parent company, Milan Group, to pay rice duty.

Speaking during a phone interview this morning on a radio programme by Ships and Ports, Wale Adeniyi, National Public Relations Officer of Customs said this was because Milan Group which has refused to pay rice subsidy after exceeding its rice quota for 2014 is housed in the same premises as Intercontinental Hotel and shares the same owners.

“We are not unmindful that they have guests in the hotel. We are making representations to them to ensure that they either pay Customs duty or they evacuate their guests before we seal the hotel premises because it is the hotel that houses Milan Group” Adeniyi said.

Continuing, he said: “The owner of the companies is the same. So, we’ve given them options; either to make do their payment or we have no choice but to stop them from operating. We don’t want to create unnecessary scenes so we are going to be civil in our approach to the Intercontinental issue. The planned operation was due to government directives that the premises of all defaulting importers be sealed off.”

Customs has been given a directive to seal the business premises of all defaulting importers. “It is a directive from federal government and we are going to carry out. So we’ll give them one or two days notice to get their guests and their customers informed so that we don’t end up embarrassing anybody.”

According to Adeniyi, some of the companies have falsely claimed that the quotas given to them were to be carried over to 2015. “The documents conveying the quotas were explicit. The quotas were meant to bridge supply gap of 1.3 metric tonnes, estimated to be the volume needed by Nigeria to bridge the supply gap in 2014, and that it should be imported in a concessionary way. Also, stated that any company that exceeded the quota will have to pay what others who didn’t get concessions would pay, and that is 70 percent duty.”

In this case, he stated, Milan imported 750,000 metric tonnes in excess. Recall on 28 of June published the names of four rice importers, which owes the service over N23 billion debts for importing rice in excess of the government approved quota.

AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE with wire report