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by Ravi Ladduwahetty

The Sri Lanka Tea Board and Sri Lanka Customs have jointly nabbed four containers of refuse tea on Thursday which was to be exported to Kenya by a Gampola based tea trader as a part of a scam of exporting 800 containers of waste tea to that country under the guise of shipping it as fertiliser.

These four containers of refuse tea were nabbed by the Customs following a tip off at the entry to the Port of Colombo. The four containers were being transported from Pilimatalawa.

The Tea Board alerted the Customs Intelligence on September 8. This is a covert plan where 800 containers were going to be exported and over 100 containers have already been shipped, Tea Commissioner H.D. Hemaratne told the Daily News yesterday. He said the first container carried 18,900 kilos of tea while the total cargo weighed 75,600 kilos.

Customs officials who contacted Sri Lanka Tea Board about the nabbed containers, requested an inspection of the contraband, confirmed on sample testing all four containers that the samples contained Broken Mixed Fannings (BMF) which had 100 percent fibre particles, conforming to the specifications of refuse tea, Hemaratne said.

The export of refuse (waste) tea is illegal and the tip off came from some tea inspectors from Mid Grown Areas. He said that investigations were continuing by tea tasters to determine the origin of the tea.

Sri Lanka Customs Director ( Exports) C. Wickremanayake said that the cargo was worth around Rs. 1 million and that the punishment meted out to the shipper would depend after the completion of the investigations. There will be a formal inquiry next week, he said.

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