THE JFT EDIT

Three foreigners, including the manager of Dada Foods, a fruit juice manufacturing company in Accra, have been arrested at Kpone in the Greater Accra Region for allegedly falsifying Value Added Tax (VAT) invoices and evading taxes.

The General Manager of Dada Foods, Wang Zhong Guo, the Operations Manager, Yuh Quig Yuh, and a salesgirl, Rose Chen, were arrested in a special exercise undertaken by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA). The operations manager is also said to bear the name Xie Xia, although their passports have not yet been retrieved to ascertain their true identities. The arrest follows an intelligence picked up by the Counter Intelligence Unit at the Office of the President.
Duplicate VAT invoices
Briefing journalists at the Customs Laboratory in Accra yesterday ahead of a visit to the premises of Dada Foods at Kpone, near Tema, in the Greater Accra Region, the Head of the Special Revenue Mobilisation Tax Force of the GRA, Mr Henry Sam, said the visit by the joint team of members of the GRA Task Force and military was aimed at retrieving all VAT invoices in the possession of the company to ascertain the total amount the state had been deprived of.

He said after intelligence was gathered, the team, in collaboration with the police, last Saturday intercepted and impounded two vehicles belonging to Dada Foods and loaded with fruit juice produced by the company on the Accra-Tema motorway. The team found that Dada Foods issued to its customers original VAT invoices that were different from the duplicate submitted to the GRA.

Copies of the original and duplicate VAT invoices were shown to the media. On one of them, the VAT invoice issued to a customer had the amount GH¢11,000, while the duplicate which was submitted to the GRA had GH¢1,100. “When submitting duplicate copies to the GRA, the VAT invoices carried lower values,” Mr Sam explained. Dada Foods produces New Star Drink, Dada Fruit Drink and Dada Delicious Juice Drink.

Charges
According to Mr Sam, the manager of the company and his accomplices would be charged for suppression of sales, tax evasion and making false and misleading statements to the state. Subsequently, he said, the GRA would undertake a comprehensive tax audit that would comprise a reassessment of the company including retrieving all invoices issued to it to re-check the various amounts indicated and submitted to the authority.

Mr Sam said when the tax audit was completed, any shortfall in taxes would attract a 100 per cent penalty pursuant to Sections 74 and 81 of the Revenue Administration Act, 2016 (Act 915). “We are also going to prosecute them and charge them for the various offences,” he said. The GRA/military and police joint task force has since stormed the premises of Dada Foods at Kpone to retrieve VAT invoices.

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Republicans in South Carolina have voted to proceed on a measure that would strip abortion exemptions in cases of rape or incest, and criminalise the procedure almost entirely as soon as a foetal heartbeat is detected.

The proposed bill is the latest attack on abortion rights throughout the United States, in an effort by conservatives keen on bringing the issue before the Supreme Court. There, they hope, they may finally be able to make good on a long held dream of repealing some or all of the landmark Roe v Wade decision largely legalising abortion in the country.

“You are in fact killing an innocent human being. Whether you mean to or not, you are punishing a person wrongfully for something he or she had nothing to do with,” said Republican state senator Richard Cash, who introduced the amendment that stripped rape and incest exemptions, in an interview with The State.

He continued: “Anyone who is alive who was conceived in rape would probably be very glad that they are alive. And would probably be very willing to discuss and argue with you about their right to life while in the womb.”

The measure in South Carolina must still pass the full legislature, before it would be sent to Republican governor Henry McMaster’s desk for a signature.

The bill does include an exemption where the pregnancy may risk the life of the mother.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of South Carolina has decried the measure as just another attack on abortion rights in the United States, and follows after a wave of 17 abortion bans being passed across 10 states in just this past year, according to an analysis of the Guttmacher Institute.

“This medically unnecessary hoop to jump through is just another example of the legislature of South Carolina trying to control women, in any way possible,” the ACLU of South Carolina wrote on its website.

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The 39 people found dead in a refrigerated trailer in Essex were Chinese nationals, it is understood. Police are continuing to question lorry driver Mo Robinson, 25, who was arrested on suspicion of murder. Officers in Northern Ireland have raided two houses and the National Crime Agency said it was working to identify “organised crime groups who may have played a part”. The trailer arrived in Purfleet on the River Thames from Zeebrugge in Belgium. Ambulance staff discovered the bodies of the 38 adults and one teenager in the container at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays just after 01:30 BST on Wednesday. The lorry and trailer left the port at Purfleet shortly after 01:05.

Police said the tractor unit – the front part of the lorry – came from Northern Ireland and picked up the trailer from Purfleet. Councillor Paul Berry said the village of Laurelvale in County Armagh, where the Robinson family live, was in “complete shock”. He said he had been in contact with Mr Robinson’s father, who had learned of his son’s arrest on Wednesday through social media. “The local community is hoping that he [Mo Robinson] has been caught up innocently in this matter but that’s in the hands of Essex Police, and we will leave it in their professional hands to try to catch the perpetrators of this,” he said. The Belgian Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office said it had opened a case which would focus on the organisers and others involved in the transport. A spokesman said the container arrived in Zeebrugge at 14:29 on Tuesday and left the port later that afternoon before arriving in Purfleet in the early hours of Wednesday.

It was not clear when the victims were placed in the container or if this happened in Belgium, he said. The lorry was moved to a secure site at Tilbury Docks on Wednesday so the bodies could be “recovered while preserving the dignity of the victims”. Essex Police said the nationalities of the victims were not immediately known and said formal identification “could be a lengthy process”. The force earlier suggested the lorry could be from Bulgaria, but later said officers believed it entered the UK from Belgium. A spokesman for the Bulgarian foreign affairs ministry said the truck was registered in the country under the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen. He said it was “highly unlikely” the deceased were Bulgarians. Shaun Sawyer, Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police and the National Police Chiefs Council lead for modern slavery and human trafficking, said while forces had prevented thousands of deaths, “tragically, for 39 people that didn’t work yesterday”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme even if there were routes perceived as easier to get through, organised criminals would still exploit people who could not access those. Thurrock’s Conservative MP Jackie Doyle-Price said there needed to be an international response. “We have partnerships in place but those efforts need to be rebooted, this is an international criminal world where many gangs are making lots of money and until states act collectively to tackle that it is going to continue,” she said. Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, said temperatures in refrigerated trailers could be as low as -25C. He described conditions for anyone inside as “absolutely horrendous”. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was an “unimaginable tragedy and truly heartbreaking”. A vigil is being held at 18:00 outside the Home Office to “call for urgent action to ensure safe passage” for people fleeing war and poverty.

How many migrants have died in transit?

The number of migrants who die in transit has been recorded by the UN since 2014. Since then, five bodies of suspected migrants had been found in lorries or containers in the UK before this tragedy. Data was not collected in the same way before the migrant crisis began in 2014, but such deaths are not new. In 2000, 58 Chinese migrants were found suffocated to death in a lorry at Dover. In 2015, the bodies of 71 people were found in an abandoned lorry on an Austrian motorway. Police suspected the vehicle was part of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human trafficking operation.

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Nollywood actress Princess Shyngle is single again after her Senegalese fiancé was recently arrested over alleged fraud in New York.

Frederic Badji was allegedly picked up in September 2019, around the same time the actress announced she’s quitting social media.

Also, it was revealed that Frederic Badji had been cheating on her and she only discovered recently. Shyngle has since moved out of his house in New Jersey and has ended the engagement.

The US has responded to Ghana government’s decision to terminate the power concession agreement with the Power Distribution Services. In a statement, the US said it notes this decision with regret.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) which is the US partner, helping Ghana with some GH¢500million says the second tranche of the money, GH¢190million is no longer available as a result of the termination.

The Communications Minister has dismissed reports that she called critics of the Akufo-Addo government witches. 

Ursula Owusu-Ekuful who is also the Member of Parliament for Ablekuma West said she never called anyone names for complaining about the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government.  According to her, she merely touted the NPP government’s achievements as “remarkable and tangible and asserted that only blind propagandists would feign ignorance of these visible achievements which were obvious and had touched every home in this country.” The MP claims she urged the youth to boldly respond to propagandists with the truth and to itemise the strides made by the NPP government in the past two and half years, just as the vice president, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia recently did during the NABCO anniversary celebrations.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said she never instructed the youth to shut complainants down as the news article purportedly suggested. “We take serious exception to this false story which has received wide circulation, readership, and subsequent publication from other media houses and demand a retraction and apology,” a statement from the Minister’s office said.

Her Office also urges the public to disregard these false media reports and treat them with the contempt they deserve. “Mrs Owusu-Ekuful respects the right of all Ghanaians to have their own opinions about any issue though she may not agree with it,” it added.

One of the most senior politicians in South Africa’s historically white main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) has resigned his post and quit the party over how it handles race.

Herman Mashaba’s election victory in 2016 saw him become the first non-ANC mayor of Johannesburg since 1994.

But at a press conference on Monday he said: “I cannot reconcile myself with people who believe that race is not important in their discussion of inequalities.” He said his decision was sparked by the re-admission of Helen Zille, a white politician who provoked widespread anger in 2017 when she praised aspects of colonialism, to the party’s high ranks:

“The election of [Helen] Zille as chair of federal council is victory for people who are opposed to my belief systems.” Mr Mashaba also said the government’s “pro-poor agenda” has been “undermined, criticised and rendered nearly impossible” by the DA. Mr Mashaba was seen as a key ally of the party’s first black leader, Mmusi Msimane, in his efforts to increase support among black voters.

But the DA’s share of the vote dropped in the May general election after conservative whites abandoned the party, and Ms Zille’s return to a senior post in the party is seen as an attempt to regain their support. Mr Mashaba said he would step down next month, raising questions about whether the DA would be able to retain the mayoral post in Johannesburg.

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