KARACHI: A raiding team of Collectorate of Customs Appraisement West seized four containers from Al-Hamd International Container Terminal (AICT) and recovered 31,112 mobile phones and tablets of different brands during a raid on Saturday night, the custom sources informed.
According to details, Collector Customs West Shehnaz Maqbool received a tip-off that huge quantity of mobile phones and others have been cleared from the port by misdeclaration. The cost of the smuggled handsets and tablets is reported to be worth over Rs 1 billion.
The collector customs appraisement west constituted a raiding party headed by Deputy Collector R&D Imran Rasool which kept the suspicious containers under watch and lastly seized the same in the presence of officials of intelligence and other security agencies.
The containers belonged to Messers Arham & Co Lahore, Rana Enterprises the initial investigations revealed.
The raiding party opened all the four containers and found that the containers were stuffed with mobile phones and tablets of different brands while the Bill of Loading B/Ls declared the containers to have garment accessories, refrigerator parts and disperse dyes.
A case has been registered and further investigations are underway. The detection of the case may lead to startling disclosures as customs officials have successfully tracked the owners, clearing agent and others who colluded to defraud the national exchequer of duty and taxes worth millions of rupees.
The report also reveals that these smartphones were ordered by four companies in Lahore through misdeclaration. As of now, Custom has filed a case against the importers of these smuggled devices.
Earlier in November, a similar case surfaced as a consignment of Q-Mobile phones and tablets was also seized in Karachi. Customs confiscated a shipment of 64,000 Q-Mobile phones worth Rs 350 million imported by Digicom Trading Pvt Ltd.
Pakistan Today tried contacting a leading cell phone manufacturer for comments but received no response.
