ISLAMABAD: FBR Chairman Salman Siddique informed the Supreme Court on Monday that duty and tax evasion on 23,882 commercial transit containers that were destined for Afghanistan but went missing from January 2008 to June last year caused a revenue loss of Rs50 billion.
In a written statement submitted to the court, he said a reconciliation exercise for commercial containers was being finetuned and the number of missing containers might increase by 500.
The court was earlier informed by the FBR that the details of 3,688 containers had not been found in the record of the Afghan Wakil Tijar and another 3,142 containers had not been received in Chaman.
Show-cause notices for 6,830 Chaman-bound containers have been issued for the recovery of Rs13 billion.
The chairman said that after concluding the exercise for Chaman-bound containers, complete record of about 108,000 cross-border certificates of Peshawar customs had been obtained from the federal tax ombudsman.
He said duplicate copies of the certificates were retained after the goods crossed the Torkham border under customs escort.
It was found that 17,052 containers which had left Karachi for Torkham had not reached the destination and had been pilfered or smuggled inside Pakistan.
He said directives had been issued to customs authorities in Karachi to initiate proceedings.
The non-commercial transit cargo imported by the Afghan government and Nato/Isaf and non-commercial imports by US military is also being reconciled and information about cargo cleared between January 2007 and December last year is being analysed.
He said about 5,000 declarations had been found to be suspect while comparing the records at the border and in Karachi.
Mr Siddique said the FBR had tried to seek cooperation of the Afghan government and sent the data of commercial transit cargo for verification, but a response was still awaited.
He said instructions had been issued for lodging FIRs about 147 containers.
He said 48 suspect certificates had been sent to Quetta customs for verification and 45 of them, involving 51 containers, had been found fake and fabricated. More such cases are being traced.
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