BusinessDay Awards 2015: Access, Zenith, Skye, First Bank, Ayeni, lead winners.

At a glamorous black tie dinner organised at the weekend at the prestigeous Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island , Lagos, leading financial institutions in the country vied for BusinessDay’s Annual Banking Awards, which have become an industry benchmark for outstanding performance.
At the awards,outstanding Nigerian banks and their innovative managers who directed their organisations on the path of creativity, growth, profitability and safety, were honored.

Access Bank came out overall tops to clinch the award of the Bank of the Year, having recorded gross earnings of N168.3 billion for half year ended June 30, 2015, representing an increase of 43 per cent over the N117.9 billion recorded in the same period in 2014.
Contesting closely with Zenith Bank and FCMB, Zenith Bank’s Peter Amangbo, emerged as the bank CEO of the year, a position that was keenly contested by Access bank’s Herbert Wigwe and FCMB’s Ladi Balogun.

Stakeholders Propose Strategies to Rev up Tax Revenue- At BusinessDay forum

At a forum organised yesterday by BusinessDay in partnership with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), stakeholders suggested strategies that could help government rev up income through taxes, especially in the face of the present lean oil revenue.

Samuel Ogungbesan, immediate past acting FIRS chairman, suggested that the first step would be to populate a central tax database that would provide adequate information on those eligible to pay taxes, as obtainable in France with over 32 million tax payers and South Africa.

He said there was need to further push for an efficient tax revenue collection process, but that this would only happen if the entire tax system was computerised in order to check the present trend of running after taxpayers.

 

There is also the need for other stakeholders to challenge the tax system, he said, as he bemoaned the discord between policy makers and regulators, and kicked against the resolution of the National Assembly on the enactment of the FCT Board of Internal Revenue despite informed counsel by the office of the erstwhile minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.