Abuja — As the Customs Duty Investigation team continues to dig deeper into cases of duty evasion and underpayments, the Nigeria Customs Service has suspended First Bank PLC from participating in its duty collection scheme.

Spokesman of the Customs Wale Adeniyi who disclosed this yesterday during a chat with our correspondent said the bank's suspension followed the involvement of its officials in fraudulent diversion of duty payments due to the Federal Government.

According to him, the Comptroller General of Customs Abdullahi Dikko who mandated the Special Investigation Team to expose high profile duty evaders vowed that the service would take all necessary steps to recover the diverted funds and deal with individuals or organizations who connived with duty evaders.

Since the beginning of its operations, the team has uncovered duty underpayments to the tune of over N12 billion.

The revenue shortfall which is threatening the realization of the 2009 revenue target of N650 billion is largely attributable to high incidence of unpaid assessments, use of fake or cloned receipts, use of manual payments and unremitted collection by banks, the Customs said. So far, over N6 billion has been recovered by the Special Investigation team, which has now extended its operations to the eastern ports.