– had been cleared in Polar beer scam probe report
The Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) recently terminated the employment of six high-level officials who were cleared in the Polar beer scam report, but had been sent on leave to facilitate an investigation.
The six high-ranking officials were sent on leave after bombshell revelations rocked GRA, but sources informed that they had remained on the agency’s payroll. They were recommended for reinstatement in the report of the Auditor-General led investigation into the multimillion-dollar bribery scandal since the task force found that they were unaware of what was unfolding within the administration at the time.
Stabroek News was reliably informed that termination letters were recently sent out to Rohan Beekhoo, Deputy Commissioner of the Value Added Tax and Excise Department of GRA; Ramnarine Makardajh, Director of the Enforcement Section, Customs and Trade Administration ; Nityanand Narootandeo, Supervisor of the Entry Processing Unit; Royan Sattaur, Clerk 11 attached to the Import Verification Unit of VAT and John Tularam, Supervisor attached to VAT office, GRA and Paul Prescott, former Director of the Enforcement Section, CTA.
Commissioner General of GRA Khurshid Sattaur declined to comment on the dismissals when contacted yesterday, but he also offered no denial. “I will not comment on that at this time,” Sattaur said and he insisted that a public statement on the matter would be forthcoming.
Specifically, the task force said in the report that there was no concrete evidence to implicate the senior officials. It was stated that a warning letter should be issued to Beekhoo to be more vigilant in the execution of his duties in “view of the fact that the (risk) profiling system of imports appeared to have been breached during his tenure as chairman”.
The explosive report had implicated a top Fidelity Investments official, a broker and 14 Customs employees from various departments who were complicit in the fraud and it had concluded that fake documents were submitted to Customs by those involved. Subsequently, the Customs employees and two brokers were charged and are still before the courts, but Fidelity faced no new charges.
While a string of serious disclosures was made in the report, stretching from Customs declaration forms that had numerous discrepancies to data being tampered with after being inputted into GRA’s TRIPS system, the task force report also focused on a critical part of the investigations, which were the taxes that were allegedly evaded by Fidelity; Customs duties totalling $321.5 million were said to have been evaded. It was recommended that Customs duties and taxes be calculated on the Polar beer found at Fidelity and, any other fine as prescribed by the Customs Act and or any other relevant legislation against the importer [Fidelity].
The report concluded that it was Polar beer that had been brought into the country and not soft drinks as had been claimed by some Customs employees. Furthermore, while a price of US$2.15 per case had been listed by Fidelity, an investigative team that travelled to Venezuela found that Fidelity had been sold the beer at US$4.40 per case.
The investigation at the Customs and Trade Adminis-tration (CTA) was initiated at a special meeting convened by President Bharrat Jagdeo on April 7, 2008 where he stated that there was a scheme to systematically defraud the CTA of revenue and he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
On January 15, 2008 a team of customs officers had raided Fidelity and found in excess of 73,000 cases of Polar beer for which no import documents could be produced. It was then claimed by Fidelity that the broker had substituted invoices for Polar beer with invoices for mixed flavours aerated beverages – the duty rate being vastly different for the two.
The Internal Affairs Department of the GRA then conducted its own investigation and arrived at the following conclusions on March 28, 2008: The Polar beer had been smuggled into the country, that some of the beer was smuggled via trawlers and discharged at a Parika landing, and that the rest of the beer was illegally brought in at the rear of containers which were declared to contain only aerated beverages.
