BREAKING NEWS, Politics
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THE Federal Executive Council, FEC, on Wednesday, May 18, approved the proposal by Aliko Dangote, chairman, Dangote Group, to construct Lokoja-Obajana-Ilorin Road. Dangote Cement’s Obajana factory is located along that axis.
In return, Dangote will hold back 30 percent of his company’s income tax for some years. Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, disclosed this to State House correspondents at the end of FEC meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari.
He was accompanied by Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information; Chris Ngige, minister of labour and productivity, and Abubakar Malami, Attorney-General of the Federation.
“So we presented a proposal by one of the subsidiary of Dangote group, a construction company, for the construction of a section of Lokoja-Obajana-Kabba-Ilorin, specifically the section between Obajana-Kabba Road using cement as demonstrative of how perhaps we should continue to build going forward in order to reduce maintenance on the road and the company proposing to fund the construction of that section of the road in exchange for some tax remissions.
“Companies are ordinarily supposed to pay income tax. There are existing policies in our laws which enable government to consider and give taxes incentives. So council consider and approved the proposal for Dangote Construction Company to build that section of the road because the tonnage of cement being produced from the factory has increased and the traffic in that area has increased, there had been unfortunate accidents also.
“So it is a total economy policy which council considered and approved because it gives support to industry, it enables us take benefit of our tax law to renew infrastructure at a time we are really challenged for resources to finance all our routes. It also enables us to save lives by quickly and urgently rebuilding that road so that other commuters who also depend on that road for their livelihood would also benefit from the road.”
He said, “We presented a memo to council for consideration. The memo seeks to take benefits of the existing policy and regulation. It seeks to take benefits of tax policies, tax laws for the purpose of using them to drive infrastructural development renewal. – The Nation
— May 18, 2016 @ 17:25 GMT
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