PESHAWAR. The Sarhad Chamber of Commerce and Industry demanded of the government to take serious action against Maersk Line in Rs 15 billion demurrage and detention scam.
The Chambers are meant to solve the issues faced by industrialists, exporters and importers, and fraud done by Maersk line is being highlighted on every forum in order to stop the illegal activity of demanding demurrage & detention charges by the company.
Industrialist and Senior Vice President of SCCI Saad Khan while talking with Customs Today in Peshawar said the issue is already in the limelight due to letters of importers to the law enforcement agencies including FIA and NAB to launch probe against the shipping company.
Saad Khan further said that FIA and NAB needed to quickly respond to the demands made by importers in official letters because the activity of Maersk line has not yet stopped even after media unearthed this billions of rupees scandal.
The senior vice president added that first of all, trade has been badly affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to rise in militancy. After bearing loss of billions for last ten years, now shipping lines are looting the importers of KP by demanding extra demurrage and detention charges.
He said NAB and FIA needed to arrest the representatives of these shipping lines for looting importers and violating Customs Act. Customs Department should also awake from deep slumber and take the action of delay in clearance process.
He said the shipping line also forced the importers to pay huge illegal sums. The customs staff and shipping lines are used to delay the clearance and delivery of the goods to the importer. Due to this delay, the revenue collection of duty and taxes is slowed down drastically of the actual speed.
Meanwhile, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) received a complaint seeking probe to ascertain role of employees of Maersk Line in country’s biggest shipping scandal involving 610 billion rupees.
Importers lodged application against Maersk Line and its subsidiary in Pakistan Maersk Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd for conspiracy, cheating and criminal breach of trust under PPC 407, 409, 420, 427, 506 and others so that these fraudsters are stopped to blackmail genuine importers by demanding ‘illegal’ additional charges.
The complaint received by the NAB and the FIA demanded legal action for recoveries of amounts looted and recovering losses of Rs. 610 billion to the national exchequer per year while also stopping such further losses from the accused persons of Maersk Line and M/s Maersk Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd including Søren Skou, Claus V. Hemmingsen, Søren Toft, Vincent Clercp, Morten H. Engelstoft, others of Maersk Line and Arslan Khan, Hazanfar Khan, Raheel Salim, Maqsood Ul Hasan Khan, Fuad Khan, Hasan Faraz, Shakeel Masih, Omer Khan, Ali Jawad Alvi, Zafar Iqbal, Ayesha Chowdhry, Zahid Hussain, Salman Ahmad, Aamir Ali, Umais Aziz Khan, Mohammed Naeem, Farheen Mahmud, Mubasshar Iqbal, Affaq Syed, Syed Mohammad Abbas Jafri, Muhammad Tanveer Sharif, Salman Ateeq, Hamza Haq, Ziad Mahboob, Aamir Ibrahim, Yasir Saeed Khan, Amal Sadiq Dawood, Effat Mehmood, Maria Urooj, Zain Warsi, Mehreen Zulfiqar, Awais Saleem, Zafar Iqbal, Syed Osman Iqbal Zaidi, Anum Yaqub, Fahad Ali, Obaid Iqbal, Zahid Hussain, Muhammad Ali Qureshi, Danish Siddiqui, Amir Arif, Arshad Ayub, Syed Mudassir Ali, Syed Hammad Hussain, Ayesha Qadri, Sheikh Samiullah, others of M/S Maersk Pakistan Private Limited.
