Luxury vehicle fiasco
Businessman Brian Tiwari, owner of BK International, was sometime last month found in possession of a 2014 luxury vehicle that had an outdated number plate; and Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) Commissioner General Godfrey Statia has revealed that there are several similar cases within the country.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Statia pointed out that the Guyana
Godfrey Statia
Revenue Authority has detected more than a thousand vehicles on the roadways with wrong number plates, or dual number plates, or number plates that belong to older vehicles.
He noted that sometimes the number plates of vehicles that had crashed and were written off were put on new vehicles by their owners in an effort to avoid paying the relevant taxes.
“Mr BK’s case is not the only case I’ve seen. Unfortunately, that one got in the news, but trust me, that is not the first and would not be the last… And believe it or not, some of the things that we’ve found (would) boggle your mind. Because there’re some taxpayers – who you don’t even want to hear their names – who’ve been involved in that,” the GRA boss disclosed.
To highlight the prevalence of this situation, Statia revealed that, earlier this year, a GRA vehicle was involved in an accident and a staff member had replaced it with another vehicle as a cover-up.
“The staff (member) went to Suriname and brought (a vehicle) over, changed it,
put on the number plate and sprayed it back. My staff! So both himself and his father were dismissed for that same reason. So (this cover-up to evade paying the relevant taxes) is all around, and we need to understand the society in which we live. We could only do so much,” the concerned GRA Head remarked.
Outlining that vehicles are coming into Guyana not only from Suriname, but Brazil as well; and they are not being registered, he told Guyana Times that GRA officers now have to go to the various warehouses of the vehicle dealers to conduct checks.
He said that in efforts to put an end to this practice, GRA staffers have been working along with the Police to collect information relating to those vehicles that have been written off.
Customs officers had reportedly seen Tiwari’s 2014 model SUV on Main Street, Georgetown a few weeks ago, and had become suspicious, since it carried a registration number that was issued a decade ago. The officers called and informed their supervisor, who instructed them to take the information of the vehicle and the matter would be dealt with on the following Monday, since it was late Friday and they had no access to the GRA database.
Investigations that followed revealed that the registration number on the vehicle had been issued to Tiwari, and he had probably placed the number plate of an older vehicle on the SUV, which was unregistered.
The Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic (Amendment) Act 2008 (Act Number 12 of 2008) was amended nine years ago to insert a new section – 106 A – in the Principal Act, Chapter 51:02. This new section primarily deals with cases of false number plates, and it came about following number-related crimes at the time. The offence attracts jail time and a mandatory fine of $1 million for those found guilty of this offence.
Asked why the Police had not been called in to probe the Tiwari issue, Statia unapologetically declared that the GRA should not have to be doing the job of the GPF. He reminded that that was why he had gone to court in regard to the SOCU matter, and opined that the Police themselves should have been doing the same checks or making the same observations his officers had made to detect breaches of the law. “My officers are not traffic cops,” he asserted.
