Former Finance Minister Dr. Mohammed Amin Adam has clarified that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government only implemented taxes on bet winnings, not lottery winnings, countering recent claims of a wrongly imposed betting tax.
Speaking in an interview, Dr. Amin Adam insisted his earlier statements were accurate and criticized the current Finance Minister for misrepresenting the facts in Parliament.
“I did not err. What you read were my exact words,” he stated.
According to him, the confusion stems from the Finance Minister’s claim that the government was abolishing a “withholding tax on lottery winnings, otherwise known as betting tax”—a statement Dr. Amin Adam said wrongly equated the two.
“The tax on lottery winnings was never implemented under our administration. What we introduced was a tax on bet winnings, not lottery. So calling the lottery tax a betting tax was misleading,” he explained.
He emphasized that although the government had considered implementing a withholding tax on lottery winnings, it never materialized.
Dr. Amin Adam pointed out that the Finance Minister eventually returned to Parliament to correct his earlier statement—admitting the intention was to abolish the tax on bet winnings, not lottery.
Amid ongoing political debate over the NPP’s tax policies on gambling, Dr. Amin Adam reaffirmed that only bet winnings were taxed, and the narrative about a so-called lottery tax is inaccurate.
“The betting tax they say they’ve abolished—what betting tax? The tax on lottery winnings was never implemented. That’s a fact,” he indicated in an interview on Joy News.
With this clarification, Dr. Amin Adam aims to set the record straight and dismiss claims that the NPP government imposed a tax it later had to repeal.