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THE
incidence of vehicles being broken into while parked on
side streets seems to be on the rise.
And one
of the latest victims was none other than this writer.
I had to
park my van just outside our apartment in Mandaluyong
one night because the scaffolding being used by workers
who were fixing our roof was in my parking slot. Next
morning, I realized that it was a big mistake when our
maid reported that a window on the van had been smashed.
After an
inspection, I immediately noticed that my big gym bag,
my son’s backpack, my big black jacket and some coins
were missing. Luckily, the stereo and my two sunglasses
were still there.
The
report that I filed with the nearby police headquarters
will surely become another statistic considering that
perpetrators of petty crimes that now abound in our
place in Mandaluyong are never caught. The culprits are
really very bold as, the next morning, a car that was
parked nearby was also broken into and several expensive
items were taken from it.
Many
have long been suspecting that criminals lurking in
Mandaluyong operate out of the Fabella Estate, which is
just a street away from our place. In another column I
wrote late last year, I mentioned that it was the place
where one of the windows of my van was shattered during
a stone-throwing incident between two warring gangs. My
son received several scratches from the splintered glass
as a result of that incident. No one was ever caught or
apprehended since I reported it to the police and nobody
seems interested in searching the whole area for those
criminals either.
Unless
the city government of Mandaluyong or law-enforcement
agencies stop ignoring this one major problem, various
crimes will surely continue to sprout up!
THE men
(and even) women in the Bureau of Customs who have had a
hand in the smuggling of cars in the country should be
unmasked now before it’s too late.
It is an
open secret in this country that those people working in
the bureau are raking in money. But is the government
really bent on stopping the smuggling of expensive cars,
which is being perpetrated with the apparent help of
Customs insiders?
I was
really fascinated with the information that I published
in my story last week regarding the 14 undervalued
luxury vehicles that passed the scrutiny of the men (and
there might also be women) in the Subic Bay Free Port
Customs office.
Yes,
those 14 luxury cars were valued way below their book
prices and then taken to various car dealers in Metro
Manila. They were already inside several showrooms when
they were confiscated by the agents of the newly formed
task force on antismuggling and brought back to
Subic where they were deposited beside three huge containers with
five other expensive vehicles—two of which are
Lamborghinis.
Those 14
vehicles as well as the five others are different from
the ones that were destroyed or whose destruction was
halted because of pending forfeiture proceedings.
We have
reports that those 14 vehicles were part of the
importation of one Korean national who hired the
services of a facilitator. After producing more than P13
million for the payment of the necessary tariffs, the
facilitator reportedly came up with the nasty idea of
undervaluing the cars in order to reduce the amount of
taxes that his client was supposed to pay.
But no
elementary student (not even my 10-year-old son Juan
Miguel) would ever believe the fantastic declarations
made on those 14 vehicles—a 2007 Cadillac Escalade with
a book value of $56,405, or roughly P2.8 million, and
declared at a mere $550, or roughly P27,500; a 2006 BMW
750Li (Juan Miguel’s favorite) that has a book value of
$78,100, or roughly P2.9 million, and was declared for a
measly sum of $1,600, or P80,000! And yes, a 2006 Audi
A8L Quattro, which has a book value of $72,090, or
roughly P3.6 million, and was declared at only $2,100,
or just P105,000!
How did
it happen? Do the people in the Customs simply close
their eyes when the papers pass their tables? You can
only find such unbelievable transactions here in the
Philippines!
If the
government is really bent on going after smuggling, it
should tidy up its own backyard first and the
top-to-bottom cleansing of the Bureau of Customs should
be given first priority.
But just
like the many other corruption-ridden offices of the
government, many doubt if that office could ever be
cleansed at all. |
