According to Babatunde Irukera, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s FCCPS executive vice chairman and chief executive officer, some importers and sellers of generating sets in the nation have been caught engaging in anti-free market activities like price fixing.
This was said by Irukera during a Tuesday interview on the Arise News Channel.
He claims that the FCCPC has discovered how certain businesses were underpaying the government for imported generator spare parts.
He explained that some businesses that import and sell generators in the nation have unfairly benefited from the government’s opportunity to exempt imported Completely Knocked Down generator parts from duty payment, which was meant to promote alternative energy and make generators more accessible to consumers.
“The least that society should experience,” Irukera added, “is that the candle didn’t burn from both ends, and they are not shortchanged even with respect to the expense of providing the alternative electricity, which normally is now renewable energy, but most generators.
“So, we had reliable information that not many things were going wrong in the generator business. First off, the government has relaxed some regulations in order to alleviate the generation, transmission, and distribution shortfalls by acquiring its own alternative energy sources.
“One of them is lowering or even eliminating duty with regard to CKDs, which are Completely Knocked Down parts used to construct a generator. As a result, the majority of generator importers import these CKD parts and subsequently assemble them.
“That accomplishes two things: first, the lack of duty makes it more accessible for consumers, and second, it also supports local industry by at least bringing the value-adding process, which is assembly, to be done domestically.”
The commission found that some enterprises would import a few engines in a container that would be predominately filled with spare parts and represent that as CKDs, even though spare parts remained to be subject to duty.
In the course of the interview, he also disclosed that the commission had found evidence of various anti-free market activities, including price-fixing by some importers and dealers of generating sets in the nation.
Additionally, he pointed out that businesses were distorting the free market by agreeing to fix prices by communicating with one another and signaling price movements.
