Oct 28 (Lagos) - While the bulls and bears fight it out in the Nigerian stock market, there is a new animal emerging, a much more monstrous-problem for investors called Capital Gains Tax (CGT).
Recently some very sound financial website (Naira-metrics)published the details of a call help by Standard Chartered Bank for its international clients and the representative of the tax establishment to better understand what this new CGT is all about. The website reported what the international investors called out on the CGT. That story was later published in Business day newspaper in a watered-down version.
Today the tax establishment people have re-butted the report published by the website and offered their own answers which are as robust as their explanation of how the CGT will work and how CGT is good for investors.
One thing they forgot is that when you are dealing with International investors - they are not in the typical Nigerian setting - they are used to speaking up. So when you offer arguments that make no sense - they are going to call you out. No one is going to be scared of you because you are from government tax agency, they look at you as a public-servant and not as a demi-god. It is not a Nigerian setting where we pretend that all is well when it is not.
So looks like the tax representatives had their feelings hurt because some anonymous investor called the CGT as "Basically BS".
Now they are blaming the website and questioning their journalism standards. In our opinion - Naira-metric should be commended for publishing what the anonymous investors said. Nigeria is a democracy with freedom of speech. They did not abuse you or insult you, they just expressed their feelings and now you are crying.
Many Nigerians would feel that way about the CGT but are afraid to say out of fear of being hounded by the tax authorities.
So you want to impose the CGT of 25-30% by force. We have no choice to accept it but it is like a diktat and not being done in a fair manner. People have every right to express themselves.
Facts remain and they are verifiable, even in western Countries, the CGT is not up to 25-30% anyone can check it. Use Google, ChatGPT, perplexity, bing or any other platform to check it.
So once again someone somewhere wrote a message to Mr. Taiwo,
with all due respect to you Sir,
"you go explain tire"