ISLAMABAD: The officers of custom department across the country are reportedly resorting to the dishonest tactics of filing frivolous petitions and appeals before the courts in order to retain in their possession for longest possible periods the seized vehicles actually under their personal use or in the use of their friends and families.
The sources disclosed that despite petrol rising above rupees two hundreds a litre, and the country facing a grave economic situation, FBR’s custom officers continue filling the luxury seized vehicles like V8, Lexus and Prado with government funded petrol and keeping such vehicles in their personal and private uses under the garb of frivolous petitions and appeals filed just to delay the vehicles’ release to their lawful owners even after court orders.
In a case in which the custom department had not released a vehicle despite lower courts’ orders for its release and had resorted to frivolous litigation to keep the vehicle in their possession and private use for the longest possible period, the apex court where the case ultimately landed imposed on custom department a fine of fifty thousand rupees for its frivolous litigation, wondered how the big vehicles could be smuggled into the country like match boxes concealed inside pockets and called DG custom intelligence Faiz Ahmad to explain why the vehicle had not been released despite lower courts’ orders for its release to the lawful owners.
At the time, Supreme Court was hearing this case, the court might not be knowing that a number of senior customs officers had in their possession and private use a luxury lexus and several other luxury vehicles the owners of some of which might have been dragged by him or his predecessors in frivolous litigation with the same ulterior motives, a litigation similar to the one now brought before the apex court.
The sources wondered how the vehicles which the custom department seized under the charge of smuggling could become lawful once these were grabbed by the custom officers themselves and brought under their own personal and private uses or the uses of their friends and families.
The sources said that in many of the cases like the one now heard by the apex court, an untold story of public misery and the custom department’s administrative excesses remains hidden in the background.
The day courts come to know how the custom department’s officers themselves change the laws, issue SROs and indulge as accomplices in the large scale smuggling, that day will begin the true justice in deciding the smuggling cases.
The officers from bottom to top of the department of custom intelligence created to keep vigilance on and prevent such smuggling extort massive amounts of bribe money in return for keeping their hands off such smuggling from custom stations and highways.
The best proof of the collusion of FBR’s top hierarchy in the offence of smuggling is their zero performance in securing convictions of smugglers and in identifying to the special judge customs the smugglers and their properties for proceedings under the Prevention of Smuggling Act, 1977, the sources added.
The sources further said FBR enjoyed massive authority of making rules and issuing SROs which the high ups of customs have been massively misusing for their personal gains.
Adding a matching accountability to the FBR’s massive authority, sources said, could begin a new smuggling free and crime free era in the history of country’s revenue administration. Few cases like the one in which apex court has fined the custom department will then land before the courts.
