COLOMBO: The spectacular drug bust this summer in Colombo that uncovered 176lbs of cocaine hidden in a sugar container has now been tied to the sensational story of a British aristocrat arrested in Kenya, also on smuggling charges. This link may have exposed a worldwide pattern in which innocent commodity traders are becoming the new victims of mafia-linked drug trafficking. Ammaiappan Vasudevan – the 51-year-old owner of Amro Commodities is currently held in prison without bail pending trial after being charged with smuggling cocaine worth an estimated Rs. two billion or £14m.
His trial is set to start on October 11. Meanwhile in Nairobi the trial of Jack Marrian the 31-year-old Managing Director of Mshale Commodities, (a subsidiary of London-based ED & F Man, where he has been employed for the last seven years) is set to start on October 3. He faces charges of smuggling 220lbs of cocaine. Neither man knows each other, nor have their companies ever done business, but their predicaments are linked by dockside corruption in Brazil.
The Sunday Leader has unearthed startling indications that both Marrian and Vasudevan are the fall guys for a trade that exploits significant weaknesses in how shipments are secured before and during their journey. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime report states that 90% of all trade is conducted via maritime containers of which more than 500 million are shipped yearly and of this amount, less than 2% are inspected. It is believed that drug gangs have started targeting sugar because, until now, it has been deemed a ‘low risk’ import and rarely searched. Contents also do not show up on scanning equipment, therefore have to be searched by hand – a monumental task when a single container carries approximately five hundred sacks of sugar. Brazil, the largest of the sugar producers, exports approximately 27.7m metric tons annually.
Once sugar importers have purchased an overseas consignment, they have no control over which ship is used or what route it takes. Shippers simply book the goods onto the next most convenient departure.
To counter theft and deter smuggling, international companies follow set security measures to protect consignments from tampering. Each commodity load is counted into a container, then locked with a seal and placed inside a bonded warehouse until the ship is ready to be loaded.
However, the system is not 100% foolproof or infallible and dockside corruption allows ‘senders’ to hide narcotics along with duplicate container seals. The ‘receivers’ break open the container at some point en route, remove the stash and re-lock the doors with the new seals. This is known as the ‘rip off’ or ‘gancho ciego’ [blind hook] tactic. None of the merchandise is stolen, ensuring that importers at the far end remain none the wiser if the shipment has been tampered with in transit.
Meanwhile, here in Sri Lanka, events unfolding over June 13 and 14 were almost identical to those that happened a month later in Mombasa.
According to local media reports Vasudevan, an importer for 25 years with no history of any offences, had ‘willingly complied’ when asked to attend ‘a routine check’ on June 13, and he was ‘already waiting for them at the yard’. Having failed to find anything in the scanning of the first containers, the Narcotics Raid Unit (NRU) told Vasudevan to return the following day. The report continued that ‘officers were somewhat puzzled by the importer’s behavior. He conducted himself in a manner that did not arouse any suspicion and was at the yard even before the investigators arrived.’ This time, the search was successful and the cocaine, marked with a tiger stamp was found in three black travel bags. The haul was a Sri Lankan record despite the fact that Sri Lanka is not considered to have a big enough customer base to justify the arrival of such a huge quantity of cocaine. Although the country has been used as a transit point for heroin produced by its neighbours to the north, (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Myanmar) the 2015 Sri Lankan Handbook of Drug Abuse Information does not even mention cocaine use within the country.
A description of the journey taken by Amro’s 54 containers may shed some light upon why Mr. Vasudevan behaved like a man with no idea what was about to happen to him.
On 4th May, 184 sugar containers belonging to export company Sucden were loaded onto MSC Julie in Santos, Brazil. It is not unusual for sugar companies to purchase stock while ‘afloat’ and Amro Sugars only signed a sales contract (through local Sri Lankan agency, Ramcom) once the ship was fifteen days out to sea. Amro bought 54 of the containers, while other Sri Lankan importers, RG Brothers bought 90, and Woodland and Benson both bought 20 containers each.
