Anambra State Internal Revenue Service (AIRS) has urged the Former Governor of the State and the Labour Party Presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election, Peter Obi, to discontinue the falsehood, with the claim that SABMiller Breweries is the highest taxpayer in the state.
While refuting Peter Obi’s assertion, Dr. Greg Ezeilo, the Chairman of AIRS, affirmed that the company ranks sixth in the list of top taxpayers in the state and that First Bank is the highest, followed by Zenith Bank, United Bank for Africa, Access Bank, and Fidelity in fifth place.
The AIRS boss pointed out that SABMiller made a gross payment of N656.5million from 2023 to 2024, below what the other five organisations ahead paid, and that Peter Obi’s statement on the claim at a political campaign is misleading and incorrect.
The AIRS Chairman further calls on the former governor to desist from playing politics with falsehood, which is the least expected from a former state leader.
“In this sense, the claims can be dismissed with a wave of the hand as the company contributed on average, N28 million per month in 2023 and N26.62 million in 2024,’ he stated.
Dr. Ezeilo further averred that the clarification is necessary to properly situate Obi’s claims and to give undiluted information for the people of the state to note.
He pointed out that while the state has made monumental strides in increasing the internally generated revenue from its low ebb of between N1.5 billion and N2 billion per month, and even much lower in previous years, tax collection has consistently moved up to N4 billion per month, with an all-time high of N10.5 billion in May 2025.
This has brought to the fore Obi’s disturbing use of wrong data in his political campaigns for his candidate. It is clear that if he is not using Malaysian data references, he would be making statements regarding Indonesian submissions that are not factual.
This misinformation has been widely condemned by the citizens of Anambra, who are overwhelmed by the infrastructure and transformation of the state by Governor Soludo’s government, which has turned it into the Dubai-Silicon Valley of the country, where economic and business activities thrive.
