The appeals court has upheld a businessman’s guilty verdict after hearing that he had attempted to smuggle 1.5 tonnes of psychoactive plants worth nearly BD20,000 on a ship, by hiding them inside onions.
By concealing prohibited Indian paan (betel leaf) in the vegetables, he had also been found guilty of evading excise tax and value-added tax (VAT), for which he was fined more than BD47,000.
The Supreme Criminal Appeals Court ruled to reject the Indian expatriate’s appeal against his three-year imprisonment and deportation order.
In its March verdict, the High Criminal Court heard that he had imported 11,110 bags of the psychoactive plant by sea, weighing a total of 1,533kg.
On top of being convicted for smuggling an illicit substance, he was found guilty of evading BD3,985 in VAT, BD19,925 in customs tolls, as well as evading excise tax.
He was further convicted for 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. Judges also ordered his deportation after the completion of his sentence.
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 appellant 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 the relevant authorities.
The Public Prosecution stated that the appellant used the help of an unsuspecting customs clearance agent to acquire the necessary documents and signatures to bring the cargo into the country.
Legal consultants from the National Bureau of Revenue (NBR) and the Customs Affairs Directorate testified that the businessman 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, tobacco and gutka, a mild stimulant made from tobacco and crushed betel nuts. The ban was made into law 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.
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