CEBU CITY – Bureau of Customs Commissioner Rozzano Rufino Biazon has ordered a thorough investigation on the ten 20-footer container vans of white sugar from Thailand worth P7 million that smugglers attempted to spirit out from the Cebu International Port using fake documents.

Biazon said the shipment arrived in Cebu last Nov.22.consigned to two Mactan Economic Zone locators and was imported without permit from the Sugar Regulatory Authority.

Biazon said four container vans were declared to have cargoes of plastic parts for eyeglasses, while the other three were fraudulently manifested as marble and granite products.

Biazon ordered the filing of appropriate charges against the two companies, their brokers and complicit customs officials and employees. Names were, however, withheld pending the filing of charges.

”In smugglers’ parlance,” said Ma. Lourdes Mangaoang, head of the BOC’s X-Ray Inspection Project, “the sugar smuggling we detected and foiled in Cebu was a classic variation of the "swing modus operandi.”

The “swing” is the worst form of smuggling because those who are behind it conspire with one another to spirit the goods out of customs zone under the guise of tax-free importation, Mangaoang explained.

"At least, the government still gets something from other tax cheats like technical smugglers whose scheme of deception takes the form of misdeclaring and misclassifying their importations under lower tariff headings," Mangaoang said.

Biazon said the consignees of the sugar shipment deliberately misdeclared the shipment to avoid the required SRA permit, a government measure to avoid the flooding of the local market with imported sugar to protect the local sugar industry.

”We will never allow the export and the use of freeport zones by smugglers as conduits for their illegal activities," Biazon said.

"Just like how we pursued the smugglers of 420,000 sacks of Indian rice at Subic, we will also go after the perpetrators of this sugar-smuggling attempt, no matter who their connections are,” Biazon stressed.

”And should any customs employee were found to be involved in this attempt, the axe will definitely fall on them,” Biazon added.

Biazon ordered the BOC Port of Cebu under District Collector Ronnie Silvestre to conduct an investigation on the incident to identify all those involved and to submit to him the findings of the investigation at the soonest possible time.

Silvestre said that because Cebu has the most number of export and freeport zones in the country, his operatives are always on the alert for possible smuggling attempts using the freeport zone transshipment scheme.

Biazon thanked the Port of Cebu officials and personnel for their vigilance in preventing smuggling.*PNA

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