A new Customs Area Comptroller will be resuming at the Apapa command of the Nigeria Customs with effect from October 1, 2016. The Comptroller will be taking over from Willy Egbudin who retires from office at the end of September.
A Customs source who prefers anonymity said Egdudin who many regards as officer and a gentleman has been more than careful of late not to be roped into anything that will mess up his career which he had guarded jealously over the years.
He also ensured that erring importers, agents and officers are appropriately sanctioned. Just last Friday the command was in the news for impounding the containers of an importer who enjoyed fast track facility but who abused the privilege by falsely declaring that 26 containers containing tyres were paper board and machinery. The importer, D.I.E HOPES made away with 10 of the containers while 16 were impounded by the command.
Egbudin, who took over from then Acting CAC, Deputy Comptroller Gwani Maitizumahs, was moved to the command from Enforcement, Investigation and Inspection unit at the Customs headquarters. He has also served as CAC at Lilypond and Seme Commands.
When he resumed at Apapa, he told his men that revenue generation was vital since the command was the flagship in the country. To do this, he called for substantial compliance to the rules because according to him if there is no compliance “we will find it very difficult to generate something.
“One thing that is key is to ensure that we generate the maximum revenue and we must as a matter of fact always write a weekly report on the activities in their Command, these activities will include; the number of containers that you received into your terminal, the revenue you generated from those containers, then your records in terms of the number of Debit Notes (DN) that you issued because we know that the trading public is not fully compliant, so there must be some infractions here and there.
“We expect that the deputy comptrollers or assistant comptrollers in charge of all these terminals or units should be able to generate revenue in terms of intervention by DN. We have made this clear and this was something that was not in place before now, so we want to put that in place to ensure that we monitor this revenue from time to time,” he declared.
It was not clear as at press time who would be replacing Egbudin.
Copyright Ships & Ports Ltd. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit given to www.shipsandports.com.ng as the source.