There are fresh fears that the Lagos ports may be in for another round of congestion as customs, duty collecting banks, importers and their agentstrade blames over the delays in the issuance of the Customs Pre-Arrival Assessment Report (PAAR).
The on-going blame game over the issuance of the Customs document has been heightened by allegation of under-hand deals by the banks. The allegation is coming from freight forwarders who alleged that some bank officials are already doing brisk business with the all important customs clearance document
The stakeholders alleged that there is an existing racket between the commercial banks and some custom officers in the PAAR office.
The President of the Association of Registered Freight Forwarders of Nigeria (AREFFN) Dr. Frank Ukoh told Shipping Position Daily that for ones PAAR to be issued within two days, a substantial amount of money has to be attached to the document which is forwarded from the bank to the customs PAAR office.
Dr.Ukoh was quoted as saying: “There is a syndicate working between the banks and the officers in the customs PAAR office, when you deposit your document and an amount of money at the bank, your document is transmitted immediately and you get your PAAR within two days, others that do not pay the money will have their cargoes delayed for forty days or more.”
The AREFFN President lamented that many of the documents that went in for PAAR to be issued were not issued, and that new ones coming in are now piling up forcing congestion to build at the port.
The accusation is coming few days after a cross section of bank officials had carpeted customs PAAR, saying that the long delay in issuing the document was responsible for present delay in goods clearance at the ports. The forum was a meeting of the Nigeria Customs Service, commercial bank officials, officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the service provider Web Fontaine at the instance of the Customs Service.
The bankers had said that majority of the yet-to-be-cleared cargo at the ports do not have PAARs with which the banks could work. The bank officials expressed apprehension, with some of them saying that they were being embarrassed by their customers (importers) because of the long delay in the issuance of PAAR by the Customs.
Some of them argued that the newly-introduced PAAR has put the banks under pressure as more hands had to be employed to meet the current challenges they are facing.
While the trading of blames continues, the AREFFN President, Ukoh has raised alarm that, “the port is being congested, because goods that came in have no PAAR to clear them. If care is not taken, there will be serious problem at the port,” he said.
