By Jacquiline Emodek
From a distance, you may be fooled to believe that a farmer is transporting his bountiful harvest to the market to feed the Ugandan population, however, a closer look will unearth sack material and upon further scrutiny rolls of textiles.
The scrutiny guided by intelligence networks is what led to the interception of 34 rolls of 10,573.79 square meters of textiles used for making curtains and chairs by URA ‘s team One Enforcement recently.
According to Team One, information trickled in during the wee hours of the night about suspected concealment of the rolls of textiles on a truck from the eastern part of the country, thus putting the officer on standby.
At 2:00 a.m, the team swung into action and apprehended the culprits when they were offloading the textiles alongside bunches of Matooke in Kyengera, impounded the truck and then drove it to the URA headquarters in Nakawa for verification.
A preliminary interaction with the driver revealed that the smuggled goods were loaded in Sironko, and he feigned being unaware of the concealed textiles in the matooke. The verification findings indicate that the textiles are originally from China and were smuggled to Uganda from Kenya.
For the month of April, outright smuggling accounted for 11% of revenue recovered while undeclaration accounted for 68%, which has led URA to devise risk mitigation strategies to curb the growing vice.
During the period, a total of 190 seizures were raised weekly, with the fraud value of dutiable goods being USD 173,614 and the fraud value of non-dutiable goods being USD 2,900.
