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Racket in import of budded vehicles
By Nalaka Nonis
At least 3000 assembled vehicles have been illegally imported to Sri Lanka during the past few years, incurring losses of millions of rupees as taxes to the government, Colombo Traffic Police Headquarters revealed.

One of the main strategies of importing vehicles without paying a big tax to the Customs is to import them in two halves. For example, if a person is importing a Pajero for which the tax is about Rs. 1.5 million, importing it as two halves costs only about Rs. 50,000, police said.

Importing a vehicle concealed under a load of spare parts is another way of dodging a large tax. The tax imposed on spare parts is much lower than the tax imposed on vehicles.

The registration of such illegally imported vehicles is done in a shrewd and smart manner. For this purpose a vehicle is purchased from a government auction at a low price and the chassis number of the purchased vehicle is cut and removed.

The next step is to fix the cut chassis number to the illegally imported vehicle. Thus the chassis number of the government vehicle becomes the chassis number of the imported vehicle.

Once the problem of the chassis number is solved, the other step is to change the computerised data with the Registrar of Motor Vehicles (RMV). Though there are only selected few in the RMV who know the passwords to access data of a vehicle, somehow the data of the vehicle is changed.

Thereafter the file containing the particulars of the vehicle goes missing from the record room The reason for the free movement of these vehicles is that policemen are not knowledgeable enough on how to conduct inquiries and also have not been trained properly in identifying illegally budded and imported vehicles, Colombo Traffic Police Headquarters said.

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