By our reporter
Our highly placed snoop has chanced on information believed to have sparked off the current standoff between Uganda’s tax body, Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and Uganda’s fastest growing private media house, Next Media that manages NBS Television. URA has for the last three days been camped at the Kamwokya based political command center Television station in a bid to ‘un earth’ information related to their tax obligations. However, here is the real truth why URA and NBS are in bitter feud.
NBS TV’s CEO Kin Kariisa’s blue eyed ‘boys’ have for the last 3 weeks been digging into a hairy rising multibillion scandal involving key URA gurus and an International leasing company that suppliers American hard body vehicles to one of the companies with oil concessions in Uganda which we shall expose in our subsequent stories.
So far,the documents shared with this reporter which NBS TV also managed to ‘squeeze’ from the very tight lipped insiders who asked not to be quoted for fear of the obvious, points to the fact that so far Uganda Gov’t has lost over UGX 20 Billion in un-collected taxes from the transactions between this International leasing company and this car bond company, and that these URA officials have instead been taking kickbacks in Billions for them to conceal and cover up the transactions.
This, according to our sources has been going on for over 4 years, where URA officials connive with this company to supply American Made hard body vehicles without paying taxes, instead share the loot amongst themselves. “These guys for about 4 years, they’ve been supplying oil companies with expensive hard body American vehicles but they never remit taxes, all they do is to pass some percentage of what they would pay as taxes to these URA officials and then pocket the rest” our insider said on phone.
When Kariisa’s blue eyed boys with zeal and targets to dig information chanced on this eye brow raising scandal and picked interest to get to the bottom of it, they later realized that the syndicate involved high level officials of URA, some field work supervisors. They came and briefed Mr.Kin, currently in Nairobi on a business trip who gave them a green light to continue digging for the information for the good of the public. According to Sources, when these URA gurus got to know that the story had linked to NBS, they tried to influence by making calls to frustrate the NBS TV soldiers on ground, it’s said the calls to bosses at NBS didn’t yield much as these no-nonsense reporters continued their investigations, and Kin was still in Nairobi.
Mr.Joel Kigozi, Next media’s PRO when contacted said, “the full dozier scandal was supposed to be run this week by Wednesday because the ‘soldiers’ (reporters) had so far collected about 80% of the material needed to run the story”. So by invading the station, URA was on a mission to kill the evidence that our reporters had collected, their invasion has nothing to do with our tax obligations with any gov’t agency, they used this as a cover up, Joel said.
“You see when these guys came and destroyed our servers and computers, we lost over 8 terabyte of information on our external hard discs, so if you want tax information, do you destroy the storages instead?” Joel wondered.
PRESIDENT MUSEVENI WEIGHS IN
Apart from the fact that NBS’s legal team is in final stages of dragging the tax body boy to curt for ‘malicious damages’, our reliable sources in state house have confirmed that NBS used its good networks to lay a file of the sacrilegious scandal with names at president’s office. Though others said it Tamale Mirundi they used to quickly reach the president, others said they used other bigshots the station normally hosts on its various political shows since NBS is now arguably without doubt the political command center.
Sources quoted president Museveni warning that heads would roll soon at the tax body that has been for engulfed in scandal after scandal. In our next edition, we reveal the names of who partook what
