Scary story about smuggling Philippine Star Thursday August 1, 2013 Cloned By Alex Magno Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon exercises great showmanship in frantically shuffling around district collectors in his bureau to convince the public that something is being done to rein in smuggling. He is pulling the wool over our eyes. This is a diversion. Under his benign watch, international trade monitors estimate the gap between our documented imports and what we actually bought from abroad rose from $3 billion annually to $19 billion today. In his SONA, President Aquino estimates revenue loss from smuggling at about P200 billion. Even that astounding number might be an underestimate. At this very moment, 300,000 metric tons of rice is reported being loaded onto ships in Haiphong harbor for entry into the Philippine market — without official documentation, of course. So much for all this unenlightened talk about “rice self-sufficiency.” The surge in smuggling is not due to the people at Customs suddenly becoming several times more corrupt than they traditionally have been. Something dramatic has changed. The smuggling syndicates have corporatized and thus vastly more efficient at what they do. They use information technology to their advantage. They attune their imports to what the domestic market will absorb. They have cloned the BoC with an organization more efficient than the government agency itself, staffed by more talented people, definitely better compensated than the old bureaucrats we are all hoping will retire. We now have a “shadow BoC” in operation, with outside personnel replicating every key organic post within the official bureau. The former status quo had smugglers competing with each other, producing inefficiency and chaos. The new order streamlines the smugglers into 20 key “players” organized into guilds. Each “player” aggregates any number of brokers, much like a guild. The revenues are precisely computed and distributed along a tolling system. The corrupt Customs officials do not have to receive money themselves. They simply get their share of the “tara.” This is a great leap forward in corporate efficiency. They have reduced the traditional “kings” at the BoC into mere apparatchiks of the shadow organization. At least the “kings” now have deniability. Opinion ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1 The “shadow BOC,” according to my reliable informants, is set up like a modern military organization. That is understandable because some of its key operators had actual military training. Somewhere in Binondo, the syndicate maintains a computer server, a clone of the main BoC server. This means the “shadow BoC” gets real time information from its official counterpart. The cloned server is manned by techies who understand the power of prompt information. The syndicate rents out the top floor of a 5-star hotel to house their operations. The syndicate likewise owns a building in Macau, where the payoffs are done and financing arranged for large-scale importation. Key operatives of the syndicate are said to control Task Force REACT, which reports directly to the Commissioner. They are likewise strategically placed at the anti-smuggling units and the audit services, which explains why no major smuggler is ever caught and the BoC consistently misses its revenue targets. In Latin America, drug cartels have virtually taken control of the state with their money and ruthless firepower. The phenomenon is often described as “narco-politics.” In the Philippine equivalent, we have a smuggling cartel usurping the BoC. Somalia was once described as a “failed state” where the formal bureaucracy is actually powerless in the face of lawlessness. The BoC is such a “failed state.” No amount of shuffling and reshuffling the organic personnel in the bureau will cure the fact that its functionality has been undermined by the powerful syndicate. Ironically, the powerful “shadow BoC” caused traffic of goods to move more efficiently out of the ports. Once a container of smuggled goods is green-lighted by the syndicate, it actually moves out of the Customs area in under an hour. The traditional political protectors of corrupt Customs personnel have actually been rendered obsolete by the rise of the powerful smuggling cartel. The old patrons have been reduced to, at best, additional slots in the totem pole for the “intelligencia.” My informants supplied me with some impressive names of powerbrokers associated with the smuggling cartel. Quite a number are placed high up the political firmament and the Palace. Those in the know refer to the controlling group in this cartel as the “Timog Boys.” This refers to the avenue in Quezon City where the lead personalities habitually congregate. In his SONA, the President boasted of declining rice importation. He is not being served well by his men. While our documented rice imports have indeed dropped to about half a million tons, international grains trade monitors put Philippine rice importation at about 1.5 million tons. The greater portion enters undocumented. Smuggling is not just a government revenue problem. It infects our politics. A large amount of smugglers’ money, I am told, flowed into the war chest of the ruling coalition in the last election. More important, smuggling damages domestic enterprises. The flood of smuggled goods, from old clothes to palm oil to fuel to steel products threatens to put many domestic firms out of business. This is why our mainstream businessmen regularly cry out against the scourge of smuggling. Unchecked, smuggling could cripple our economy for decades to come. The scourge, to be sure, cannot be quashed simply by playing musical chairs at the BoC. It is the “shadow BoC” that needs to be addressed. Sent from my iPad __._,_.___ Reply via web post Reply to sender Reply to group Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (1) RECENT ACTIVITY: Visit Your Group Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use • Send us Feedback . __,_._,___
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 23:24:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015