November 29, 2006

Another smuggled Chinese pork seized in Philippine province

Anti-smuggling operatives recovered yesterday some more than US$400,000 worth of frozen pork from China at a cold storage plant in Mexico, Pampanga in the Philippines which was believed to have been stolen from the Bureau of Customs  (BoC)warehouse recently.

The manager of the cold storage plant is already held by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group headed by Jesus Versoza, reports the Philippine Star daily.

Versoza said that some Customs personnel have been in cahoots with the smugglers who stole almost two container vans of smuggled meats from China last August.

The seized "hot meat" were found in six container vans at the Kayabe Cold Storage and Ice Plant, by the Anti-Smuggling Task Group (ASTG) led by senior superintendent Don Montenegro and the BoC's Task Force Anti Smuggling (TFAS).

Personnel at the plant said the meat products were intended for a  Pampanga-based food processing company.

Montenegro said the contraband could be part of the 11 container vans of frozen meat products released by the BoC to the Eastern Trading Corp. in June wherein documents were all faked as the government already banned pork and other meat products from China. .

Authorities learned of the disappearance when the seized goods were about to be buried in Sta. Rita, Pampanga as ordered by Bureau of Animal Inudstry.

Versoza said the BoC apparently burned only one half of the contents of each of the seized container vans to show to the public that the condemned meats have all been burned.

Nicanor Briones, chairman of the Agricultural Sector Alliance of the Philippines (AGAP) said that part of the missing frozen pork products ordered destroyed by BAI had been processed into fish feeds, while the other half might have probably found their way to small manufacturers of food products.