Cigarettes to get costlier
Finance Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali today proposed raising supplementary duty on cigarettes by 1 percentage point and fixing it at 66 percent.
"Cigarettes are extremely harmful to human health. To reduce the use of such harmful products and increase revenue collection, I propose to fix the supplementary duty rate at 66 percent instead of 65 percent," the minister said in his budget speech.
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He also recommended increasing the value added tax on the local production of cigarettes and bidi paper (a type of cheap cigarette made of unprocessed tobacco wrapped in leaves) to 15 percent instead of the existing 7.5 percent.
One of the top tax paying sectors, tobacco industry generated more than Tk 32,502 crore in revenue from domestic cigarette sales (nearly 80 billion sticks) alone in 2023-24 fiscal year, an 8 percent increase from the previous year, according to data obtained unofficially from a source of the National Board of Revenue.
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