The Senate yesterday expanded its panel probing alleged N30 trillion revenue leakage in the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS).
The expansion of the investigative panel followed a point of Order by Chairman, Senate Committee on Customs Excise and Tariff, Senator Hope Uzodinma.
The Senate asked its Committee on Marine Transport to join the Committee on Customs, Excise and Tariff in the investigation in view of more revelations emanating from the probe..
Uzodinma told the Senate that his committee stumbled on more startling discoveries beyond the N30 trillion being investigated.
He said his committee required more hands in the investigation as it discovered that beyond foreign exchange fraud, ”more trillions of Naira were lost to shady deals by some Asian companies”.
He said: “The recent one which is mind blowing is that shipping companies will load full cargoes worth billions of Naira, come into the country and go to bonded terminals offload and Nigeria government will not collect one kobo.
“All they do is informal negotiation with the terminal operators, the regulators and then they will offload which is an international crime.
“We have identified over 228 vessels with their registration numbers, the terminals where they offloaded and we are going through Customs database tracking every shipment, vessel that came and offloaded.
“There is another fraud we discovered, which is, all the Asian companies moving all their goods to Cotonou in Benin Republic and these goods are meant for the Nigerian market.
“From our investigation, the companies change their documents by midnight as if the shipment is either done from Cote d’ivoire or Cotonou and they move into Nigeria.”