No criminal charges have been laid against anyone for the multimillion-dollar Polar beer fraud at Customs, despite recommendations by a special task force that several officers be prosecuted for their part in the scheme.
Since the release of the task force report in January, the file has been sitting with Director of Public Prosecutions, Shalimar Ali-Hack, who has consistently avoided questions on the report.
Stabroek News made numerous attempts to contact the DPP, and has been repeatedly told that she is unavailable. Subsequent visits to her office also proved futile.
Acting Auditor General, Deodat Sharma, who headed the task force, said last week that the report is being actively followed up by the DPP’s office. He said that the DPP has been in touch with him, and he was optimistic that her findings would be known soon.
“..She is dealing with it. It’s not lying low,” Sharma said in reference to the report, while adding that the DPP is carefully scrutinizing the report before deciding on any likely charges.
The task force report, which was released in January and was forwarded to the DPP Chambers for advice, concluded that fake documents were submitted to Customs by both the broker and Fidelity Investments Inc and charges were recommended against a top Fidelity Investments Limited official, a broker and 14 Customs and Trade Administration (CTA) employees from various departments who were said to be complicit in the fraud. Some persons had been dismissed even before the completion of the report.
It also concluded that it was Polar beer that had been imported and not soft drinks as had been claimed by some Customs employees. Furthermore, while a price of US$2.15 per case had been listed by Fidelity, an investigative team that travelled to Venezuela found that Fidelity had been sold the beer at US$4.40 per case.
The report, submitted to President Bharrat Jagdeo, also made a number of recommendations to plug loopholes in the Guyana Revenue Authority and lamented that key cameras had not been functioning at a time when it would have been useful for the investigation. It also found that the software suite for the GRA had been manipulated. The payment of millions in duties in cash and the disappearance of key documents have also raised questions.
Sharma was asked to head the task force set up by the President in April last year to investigate allegations made by a top Fidelity Investments Limited official about an organized scheme to smuggle Polar beer into the country.
Fidelity had reportedly proposed a deal with the revenue body: that it would reveal how 73,000 cases of Polar beer were cleared from the wharf without duties being paid in exchange for charges instituted against the company to be dropped.
The Fidelity official then fingered top GRA officials contending that the company had entrusted a customs broker with $142 million to get the shipment from the wharf and the man reportedly arranged with Customs to clear the Polar beer as “assorted soft drinks”, since this attracted less tax. The sum of $32 million was then paid to the GRA in taxes and another $70 million was paid to a top customs official who allowed the shipment to leave the wharf and who was also alleged to have facilitated documents being falsified for Fidelity.
However, a few days after this went down, a report was made to the GRA hierarchy and it rushed to seal the Fidelity bond at Broad Street.
The customs broker, when approached by the authorities, produced documents showing that soft drinks had been cleared from the wharf and not beer.
Fidelity has since denied ever bribing any Customs officials.
The Polar beer fraud grabbed national attention in April last year, resulting in President Jagdeo initiating a task force to conduct an investigation.
