The Upper East village of Pulmakom’s tobacco goods were seized by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and destroyed by the Customs Division.
After entering the nation illegally and avoiding taxes to the detriment of the national coffers, the tobacco items were seized.
Customs Division of the GRA met in Tamale to destroy the tobacco items that had been seized in concert with the military leadership and other security agencies.
A warehouse in Pulmakom, Upper East Region originally held dozens of boxes of tobacco; however, these were seized because of unauthorized entrance and tax evasion.
In an interview with Citi News monitored by Puretvonline.com, Georgina Lamisi Tibanye, the Sector Commander of the Customs Division of the GRA, who oversees the Northern and North-East Regions, disclosed that on September 5, 2023, intelligence was gathered that resulted in the identification of a warehouse in the Upper East Region. A team was then assembled to deal with the issue.
She listed a few difficulties that arose when moving the confiscated tobacco items to their warehouse so that additional measures might be taken.
Furthermore, more tobacco items are still in the warehouse awaiting further action because of the dangerous conditions on the ground and the possibility of possible attacks.
The illegal cigarettes that we are dealing with were taken from Pulmakom in the Upper East Region. On Sept. 5, 2023, we received an intelligence message. Cigarettes that were not authorized were kept in a storehouse. Three teams—Accra, Ho, Tamale, and Tema Collection—are selected from our headquarters. We had received the location from two men we had sent on a mission earlier.
The curfew forced us to call in the military for assistance. We had to make do with what we could grab and lock up the rest to be moved to Tamale due to the unfavorable security circumstances. We had sixty-nine million illegal cigarette sticks total.
Tamale Collection detained 162 cigarette boxes on its own. A number of us got together with illegal substances and some pornographic items, which will also be destroyed, prior to the Pulmakom operation.
The Sector Commander revealed that the culprits fled as soon as the team arrived. She is still hopeful, though, that the ongoing research will soon produce some answers.
She underlined how tough it is to make an arrest in these situations because of the carriers’ carelessness with the goods they are transporting.
When talking about the economic effects, Madam Georgina Lamisi Tibanye revealed that the tax losses experienced by GRA from the impounded tobacco items were an astounding GHC 7,951,238.39.
She also highlighted the negative consequences on the nation’s economy by expressing concern about the billions of cedis lost nationwide as a result of tax evasion.