Smugglers bend rules to bring in even more gold

CHENNAI: Enforcement agencies seized more smuggled gold since January 2013 than they did in the three years prior to that put together. The rise in smuggling and seizures was spurred by the Centre raising duty on gold imports from 2% on January 17, 2012 to 15%, making the smuggling of the yellow metal more profitable than at any other time in the past two decades.
The frequent busts have forced smugglers to come up with innovative ways to bring gold into the country.
Officers of the customs’ intelligence wing on Thursday evening found five passengers who arrived at the city airport on a flight from Singapore carrying a total of 2 kg of gold worth 53 lakh but the officers had to let off the passengers with the gold because each passenger was carrying 400g.
Norms set by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade permit an Indian citizen who has stayed abroad for more than six months to bring 1kg of gold back to the country without having to pay duty.
A customs official said the seized gold was concealed inside a tile cleaner. “Carrying 400g of undeclared gold may not be enough to arrest a person but provisions exist that allow us to make seizures if passengers are found to be shuttling between another country and India on a regular basis,” he said.
Thursday’s incident was not the first time smugglers stretched the rules to bring gold into the country. On a flight last year between Dubai and Calicut almost every passenger was carrying 1kg of gold. The passengers had a total of 80kg of gold worth (by the value of the precious metal at the time) at least Rs 22 crore.
The World Gold Council estimated 200 tonnes of gold was smuggled into India in 2013.