Missing containers not ours-Bakhresa

Dar es Salaam. Said Salim Bakhresa and Company yesterday refuted claims that it owned 329 containers whose records went missing from the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA), causing the suspension of the authority’s top boss and several others.

The company’s director of Corporate Affairs, Mr Hussein Ally, said 85 per cent of the containers belonged to 12 companies already in record and the remaining belonged to individual persons and that these were stored at their subsidiary company known as Azam Inland Container Depot (ICD).

“There are claims that the containers belong to Bakhresa, but I would like to make it clear that none of them belonged to our company. But, we run a depot for storage of containers for business purposes,” he said.

However, the Bakhressa ICD is currently under investigation by the government over tax evasion by traders accused of clearing hundreds of containers from the Dar es Salaam Port without paying the necessary taxes. Yesterday Prime Minister Majaliwa Kassim Majaliwa said again that the ICD alongside three others were at the centre of investigations even as new reports show that not just 340, but more than 2,300 containers have been cleared without tax payment since March 2014.

The Bakhressa ICD manager did not expound whether individual businessmen could evade tax without the knowledge of the ICD operators.

Recently, President John Magufuli suspended TRA Commissioner General Rished Bade as his government cracked the whip on tax evasion which costs the government billions of shillings in loss every year.

Mr Bade was suspended alongside five other top TRA officials, including his deputy Lusekelo Mwaseba, as the State ordered investigations into Sh80 billion in tax revenue that could not be accounted for by the taxman.

The Sh80 billion was tax due from the importation of some 349 containers whose whereabouts could not be explained by TRA officials during a surprise visit to the Dar es Salaam Port by Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa.

According to Mr Ally, since the disappearance of the said containers became public, Azam depot officials have been doing reconciliation with TRA and furnished them with the names of the 12 companies owning the containers.

He stressed that the names of the owners of the containers were known and hoped that the government would soon make them public and clear the name of Azam, the subsidiary of Bakhresa.

He said that in line with President John Magufuli’s seven-day directive for the owners to have paid the taxes owned, he said that Azam ICD has deposited Sh4 billion and is in the process to deposit another amount which he did not name to cover the costs of the revenues lost from the missing containers whose actual cost is Sh12.6 billion.

Explaining about the ICDs procedure, he said that when a ship banks at the Dar es Salaam Port, the Tanzania International Container Terminal Services (Ticts) and Tanzania Ports Authority officials decide where the container would be stored.

In view of this, he said that Bakhresa containers were normally not stored at Azam depot as it was in this case.

He stressed that the Bakhresa Company has had no records of evading tax since the company was formed.

However he noted that the depot transaction have been stopped pending investigations and only the containers already in storage are allowed to go out as long as the owner paid all the taxes due.