Powerful Sri Lankans are involved in the importation and registration of super luxury vehicles allegedly submitting forged documents and the issue has been handed over to the Police Fraud Bureau for further investigations. Commissioner of Motor Traffic B. D. L. Dharmapriya told the Business Times that he has received a government audit query with regard to the registration of six vehicles illegally.
He said it is practically impossible to trace the files with documents of these vehicles as the department has no proper record room facilities. Over 400,000 vehicles had been registered last year and the department has to maintain 1.8 million files of vehicle registrations without a building for a record room and there are no proper facilities to keep these files safely. On the other hand tracing six files out of 1.8 million files is no easy task, he said. Finance Ministry sources said illegal vehicle registration is taking place in the country on a large scale incurring heavy losses to government coffers. Government audit officers have unearthed a massive racket of registering vehicles by presenting forge documents to the department. Six super luxury vehicles had been brought down to the country during the six months from June to November last year. The government audit is also conducting investigations into 23 more vehicles imported to the country in 2010, a senior official of the Finance ministry said.
The Sri Lanka Customs had to incur a loss of around Rs.40.6 million due to the illegal importation of these six super luxury while the government lost over Rs. 4.3 billion due to illegal vehicle registration during the second quarter of last year. It has been revealed that these vehicle registrations had been made by destroying files containing Customs and other documents of these vehicles and inserting false information into the computer system of the Motor Traffic Department, during the last few years.
Government auditors have made a request from the Commissioner General to hand over all the files pertaining to illegal vehicle registration. The issue of illegal vehicle registration was not new and has been widely prevalent following the tsunami disaster, the official said. |
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