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A businessman had tears in his eyes after being sentenced to three years behind bars for attempting to hide psychoactive preparations inside ‘unusually large onions’ and smuggle the illegal stimulants into the kingdom.
The vegetables were used to conceal more than a tonne of prohibited Indian paan (betel leaf), worth nearly BD20,000, the High Criminal Court heard, as judges jailed and fined him more than BD47,000.
The court found the Indian man guilty of importing 11,110 bags of the psychoactive plant by sea, weighing a total of 1,533kg, and ordered his deportation after his sentence is completed.
He was also found guilty of evading BD3,985 in value-added tax (VAT) and BD19,925 in customs tolls, as well as evading excise tax. He was further convicted with using the commercial registration (CR) record of a well-meaning customs clearance agent to import a tobacco product.
The court fined him BD3,985, and ordered him to pay back an additional BD3,985 for VAT evasion. He was fined another BD19,925 for not paying customs duties, and ordered to pay back another BD19,925. The financial penalties totalled BD47,820.
The GDN earlier reported that the smuggling attempt was busted after a Customs Affairs officer noticed that the ‘onions looked unusually large’ when he was inspecting the shipment, and began suspecting that something was awry.
The expatriate defendant co-operated with associates overseas to conceal bags of betel leaves inside of individual onions set to arrive in Bahrain on a ship from India.
The officer was scanning goods arriving at the seaport, and was searching the ship – coming to Bahrain from India, via Jebel Ali, UAE – on board which concealed paan was carried.
“The onions were larger than usual, so we opened the sacks and inspected the contents. We put them through a scanner, which revealed that they were filled with toombak.”
The shipment was handed over to relevant authorities.
Prosecutors stated that the Indian defendant had used the help of an unsuspecting customs clearance agent to get the necessary documents and signatures to bring the cargo into the country.
The Bahraini clearance agent reportedly provided the accused with a filled-out customs declaration and completed all the steps required for the shipment.
The agent testified that the Indian defendant asked him to deliver the cargo to a specific location immediately upon its arrival. He agreed to help officers and the defendant was arrested when he arrived to collect his goods at a location where police laid in wait.
Legal consultants from the National Bureau of Revenue (NBR) and the Customs Affairs Directorate testified that the Indian evaded both VAT and excise taxes.
They stated that paan was subject to these tolls according to the 2022 amendment of the GCC Unified Customs Law, which imposes a 100 per cent tax on such products.
In 2010, Bahrain’s Industry and Commerce Ministry banned the import of Indian paan, along with similar products, substances used in its production and tobacco products used for chewing, under the tongue or inhalation.
The kind of paan prohibited involved a psychoactive preparation of betel leaf and tobacco, and gutka, a mild stimulant made from tobacco and crushed betel nuts. The ban was made into legislation based on a 2009 anti-smoking and tobacco law and a then-new customs system that was unified across GCC countries.
The law included a list of prohibited products, including betel nut (gutkha), green betel leaves (khaini), silver coated cardamom, areca nut (supari), smokeless tobacco (mawa and toombak), snuff and Swedish snus (an oral smokeless tobacco product which is usually placed behind the upper lip, either in a loose form or in portioned sachets, and is primarily used in Sweden and Norway).
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
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