Customs to Prevent the Import of Rag, Scrap on March
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General Directorate of Customs, will start next March, in preventing the importation of rag and scrap, within the framework of reducing the import bill, which exceeded all the red lines during the past years, and to combat money laundering and currency smuggling crimes.
Echorouk sources said that the procedure of preventing the import of rag, scrap and products that have no value is contained in the new customs law, which was submitted to the Council of Ministers, which was referred in turn to Parliament for discussion and ratification, as it contained also a deterrent action against the mafia containers that take advantage of the legal vacuum for currency transfer and money laundering through false statements, that reach the extent of importing worthless goods, like importing 6 containers of 40 feet that are loaded with used pebbles, that were collected from the streets of Shanghai, and has been declared on the grounds that they are coil papers, as a fraudulent way for money smuggling and laundering.
Total funds that have been converted to one of the foreign banks in the two operations represent 160.000 Euros, equivalent to one billion and 700 million dinars, while the initial investigations revealed that one of the involved in the case transferred more than $ 30 million through a bank account, as well as quantities of dust that was mobilized in containers that were seized and old equipment without any commercial value, along with rotten rice import from China.
In this context, official sources from the control services at the General Directorate of Customs told Echorouk, that in the context of combating corruption and smuggling, the number of investigations that have been recorded in connection with corruption rose from 500 cases during the first quarter of 2015 to 1500 cases in October,31, of the same year, which are mostly related to inflating the import of rag, scrap and goods that are worthless in order to smuggle hard currency and money laundering, in which economic institutions and Algerian, foreign importers are involved, which was confirmed by the Minister of Commerce, when he revealed, that ghost importers make the public treasury lost annually more than 200 billion centimes.
Concerning the files that were transferred to justice, the same sources said that over 2,200 files are transferred to justice, and people who are involved in these cases are national and foreign import companies, which must pay 50 billion dinars fines, and about 30% of these fines’ value was collected, a fraud which continued during the final months of last year, despite the contraction of many imported products’ prices, at a time when exchange irregularities noticed the largest share in the amount of 60 billion dinars, which is money that is suspected of being smuggled abroad.