lagos—The governorship candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, in Lagos State, Mr. Jimi Agbaje, has challenged Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State, to present the tax receipt Agbaje was supposed to have paid after being publicly accused of evading land use charges on his business premises.
Governor Fashola had last week alleged that the PDP governorship candidate had paid N500,000 of the total sum of N1.6 million reportedly owed from the backlog of three years’ Land Use Charge tax. Agbaje, in a statement by his Director of Publicity, Felix Oboagwina, challenged the Lagos State governor to produce the tax receipt.
According to him, “Good enough, Fashola is a lawyer, so he knows the maxim that: He that alleges must prove. So, I challenge the governor to show Lagosians the receipt issued to either me or JayKay Pharmacy since February, when he told his first lie.”
Faulting the governor for equating an individual with a corporate entity, Agbaje said “It is basic law, civil, contract, criminal, that an individual is different from a corporate body, and one can benefit from or suffer for what the other has done and I shall continue to wonder why a Senior Advocate of Nigeria would insist on roping me in on what a company has purportedly done, even though he knows quite well what the law says.”
Setting the records straight, the governorship candidate said that JayKay Pharmacy continued to maintain that it owed the government no land use charges. Agbaje noted that “There is no truth in this latest piece of misinformation that the governor is spreading around.
He lied again, giving the impression that my company paid money after his initial outburst and his first lie.
JayKay Pharmacy has not paid a kobo since the day Fashola launched his initial allegation. To say that I have now paid N500,000 is a lie. My company sticks to the facts contained in its initial publication, which contained its reaction to Fashola’s initial lies.”
