ZAMBOANGA CITY: Mayor Maria
Isabelle Salazar wants an investigation on the hundreds of sacks of seized
smuggled sugar which has mysteriously disappeared from the custody of the
Bureau of Customs (BOC) warehouse.
Salazar said this during an
inspection of the Customs warehouse in the city.
Earlier, local authorities have
confiscated a total 1,170 sacks of sugar and handed all these to the Customs,
but it had been discovered that only 325 sacks remain at the agency’s warehouse.
Salazar said the missing Thailand
Mitr Phol sugar must be recovered, as she saw during the inspection that some 845
bags weighing nearly 85 tons disappeared out of sight.
Port police told the mayor that there
were a group of men who wanted to take the remaining sugar purportedly bearing
her instruction, but authorities refused to release them.
Salazar ordered authorities to
investigate who these men were, as she said her name was used for smuggling
activities.
The mayor has hinted on the slow
response of the BOC here to the anti-smuggling operations by local authorities.
The BOC in many times in the past
released seized rice smuggled from Sabah in Malaysia to its importers even if
no NFA permits were shown to import rice abroad, a newspaper report said.