'Lanka bound cutlery turns to salt in high seas'

Pakistan Customs has unearthed an export fraud in which $13 million worth of goods were shipped in documents, but actually it was all salt sent to Sri Lanka.

Pakistani Police in all the four provinces are hunting for the exporter who made Pakistan Customs wiser by applying a new method to fleece the national exchequer in a big way.

Amir Ali Alvani, NTN (national tax number) 1504059 filled export containers with tonnes of salt and declared to the Customs that he was exporting steel alloy-made products to Sri Lanka, where Pakistan had never exported such items before.

The authorities explained to The News that the consignment's tail-part was searched, to subsequently find out that the bigger portion had already been cleared for shipment abroad.

"We sent out men on high seas and stopped the shipment that had slipped off, to discover that it was a sizeable consignment, and had the exporter not been stopped, he would have claimed huge amounts of export refunds from the government," said a senior official.

When asked for details, Chief Collector South (Karachi and Sindh), Munir Qureshi's relevant staff offered the following details. Export container No FSCU 7607171 was searched by Paccs system (of Pakistan Customs) to uncover that instead of the declared description of aluminum alloy metal teapots, cooking pans, sauce pans, dish and dinner spoons of various sizes, the containers were stuffed with bags of salt.

Initial investigations revealed that the consignment was bound for Sri Lanka. On apprehension that there might be other containers, the Paccs system was tapped for information, to discover that some of the containers had already been allowed shipment.

Five separate shipment documents had been filed in an obvious attempt to dodge the system and the staffs at the release channels on the same day (August 5) by the same exporter. More than US$13 million shipment is a unique cache, as never before had such a description been used and salt stuffed into containers.

Nor has Sri Lanka been the export destination for such goods ever before, officials said.