By Yohan Perera and Ajith Siriwardana   
Committee on Public Finance (COPF) had yesterday instructed the Ministry of Finance to impose income tax on companies that exploited the ‘midnight gazette’ to make significant profits, out of import duty adjustment on sugar, Daily Mirror reliably learns.  
The Committee had also tasked officials with developing and implementing mechanisms to collect these taxes or providing detailed explanations if they are unable to do so, along with proposing remedial actions to prevent such incidents in the future.   

COPF had claimed that there would have been a serious scam when observing the obtained essential data related to sugar imports for the past three months from the Department of Customs. COPF had questioned Ministry of Finance officials about the suspicious timing of this tax increase on sugar imports by certain companies just before the tax hike. Accordingly, it has been revealed that a company that typically imported 2,000 metric tons of sugar monthly inexplicably imported 10,000 metric tons in October, just before the tax increase, reaping substantial gains as the tax jumped 200-fold from 25 cents to 50 rupees.   
Ministry of Finance officials stated that the tax increase was part of the fiscal-based revenue consolidation programme linked to an IMF initiative. Furthermore, they highlighted that the sudden increase in sugar imports was a seasonal occurrence. In light of these claims, the Committee insisted on a comprehensive comparative analysis of previous years to verify these assertions.