Author: Jamie Doward and Urmee Khan in London,
and Mahtab Haider in Dhaka
Publication: The Observer
Date: April 23, 2006
URL: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1759341,00.html
In just three months, £10m worth of
heroin has been intercepted at British ports. The drugs, sent to 'ghost' companies,
came from Bangladesh. Here we reveal the traffickers' new tactics - and how
they have used one of the Asian country's most respected businesses to mask
their deadly trade
Rivington House, Great Eastern Street, London
EC1, is an unlikely conduit for an operation to smuggle heroin. A nondescript
block of smog-stained concrete, jammed among sandwich bars and graphic design
studios, it does little to attract attention from the fashionable crowd in
London's Hoxton.
But until recently its grey walls concealed
the final staging post for a complex campaign to smuggle heroin from Bangladesh.
The country was not previously linked on a large scale with the heroin trade
and the operation signalled the widening of a quiet front in the drugs war
that has alarmed customs officers. The revelation has prompted officials to
ask two questions: how much heroin is now reaching Britain from Bangladesh?
And what part has one of its biggest companies unwittingly played in the trade?
Up to last year Rivington House, an office
block which is home to scores of legitimate small businesses, was also the
headquarters of an obscure company called Ocean Line Foods. Then in April
last year the firm disappeared.
There is no record of Ocean Line Foods at
Companies House. It has no website and left no forwarding address. The company's
former mobile phone number - listed on several UK shipping documents - is
one that can be rented from Carphone Warehouse by tourists. It is not even
clear whether Ocean Line Foods has ever existed, other than on paper. But
the company's name can be found in a confidential intelligence report produced
by the Bangladeshi Department of Narcotics Control, obtained by The Observer.
The name of another UK-based company, M/S
Bengal Bay, also appears in the report. Located above a coffee shop on the
Edgware Road, London, the import/export firm shared a building with a range
of legitimate organisations, including the Feng Shui Society, a limousine
hire firm and a business called Jesus Watches. Then one day the police came
knocking. 'There was all sorts of trouble with the company,' recalled Mina
Sim, an office administrator at the company which let space to M/S Bengal
Bay. 'The police were here all the time.'
Over the past year a series of ostensibly
legitimate firms with links to Bangladesh have joined a bulging group of import/export
firms that have attracted the attention of the Met: there is the company that
specialises in exotic spices, and the firm that sells granite for kitchens
and bathrooms. Worryingly, these are just the ones that customs know about.
The consignment labelled 'foodstuffs' arrived
at Southampton port on Valentine's Day last year, where it lay unclaimed.
A couple of weeks later, another consignment - also from Bangladesh, but labelled
'beauty products' - turned up at the same port, again with no one to pick
it up. X-rays revealed the packages - sent by two Bangladesh-based companies,
Emdad Trading and Jamil International - contained a total of 21.5kg (about
47lbs) of heroin with a street value of more than £1m.
Then in May, 41.5kg of heroin were found in
a shipment labelled 'floor tiles' which had been dispatched to Southampton
by another Bangladesh-based company, Green Heaven Enterprise. Usually customs
might expect to seize 10kg in any one haul. Similar-sized quantities turned
up in legitimate consignments shipped to Felixstowe. In total, some 140kg
of the drug - worth nearly £10m once sold on to Britain's 260,000 heroin
addicts - had entered the UK from Bangladesh.
Customs officials were concerned: previously
they had not considered Bangladesh to be a major conduit for heroin. The total
amount of heroin found in just a handful of seizures in three months doubled
that acknowledged by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDC) as
passing between the port of Chittagong and the UK in the whole of last year,
and suggested the smugglers were changing tactics.
'The seizures made in the UK in 2005 relate
to an overall pattern where ethnic/language-based groups are moving product
within south Asia by making many, many small runs,' said Gary Lewis, regional
representative of the UNDC, based in New Delhi.
'The really interesting thing about the Bangladeshi
seizures was that the traffickers had managed to amalgamate a relatively large
amount of product for the two shipments to the UK, whereas most runs tend
to average only around 5kgs.'
It was clear that the Bangladeshi heroin trade
was now an urgent threat, one that had caught the UK authorities off guard.
The sophisticated nature of the operation was also alarming. The export companies
appeared to have legitimate licences and tax identification numbers which
had been issued by the Bangladeshi authorities.
The intended recipients of the consignments
- companies such as Ocean Line Foods and M/S Bengal - had recognised postal
addresses in the UK. Seemingly out of nowhere, a well-resourced and extensive
drug-smuggling operation had sprung up on the back of a legitimate trading
network.
Amid growing concern at the Foreign Office,
the British High Commission in Mumbai wrote to the Bangladeshi authorities
asking for its Customs Intelligence and Investigation Department to investigate
the trafficking. The Bangladesh government's response in the short term was
swift. It set up a secret committee comprising members of its Criminal Investigation
Department, the Rapid Action Battalion - the government's specialist anti-corruption
squad - and Special Branch to investigate the claims. Over a four-month period
the group interviewed scores of suspects, examined box-loads of import/export
licences and ploughed through thousands of shipping licences during an exhaustive
investigation that produced an extensive picture of Bangladesh's heroin trade
to Britain and, crucially, named names.
And then? And then nothing.
With a global workforce of 3,000, BD Foods
is one of Bangladesh's most respected companies. Its chairman, Bodrudoza Momen,
has been awarded the title of 'Commercially Important Person' by the Bangladeshi
government for his 'outstanding performance in export business' for three
years running.
Though few Britons will be familiar with the
company's name, the chances are that they have sampled its products. Established
in the UK in 1996, BD Foods and its sister company, King & Co, export
vast amounts of spices, snacks and pickles to Britain's curry houses. Their
parent company, BD Group, is the largest exporter of Bangladeshi fresh fish
and fruit. Unfortunately for BD Foods, a number of its consignments now lie
stranded in ports around the world as customs officials probe their contents.
The freeze stems from the leaking of the special
committee's report, which the Bangladeshi government has yet to publish -
on the grounds that its investigations are continuing.
The excuse has not stopped some critics in
Bangladesh suggesting that the government is trying to protect those accused
in the report, which has been obtained by The Observer. It shows that three
companies, Emdad Trading, Jamil International and Green Heaven Enterprise,
which were smuggling heroin to Britain, were owned by former employees of
BD Foods. It transpires that these were in reality 'ghost' companies that
were illegally using BD Foods' VAT numbers to obtain export licences so they
could ship heroin to businesses in the UK that existed only on letterheads.
Damningly, the report also claims that crooked
officials in the port authority and the shipping company were involved in
the operation, something which doesn't surprise Bangladeshi traders living
in Britain. 'Bangladesh is a poor country,' said Mahmud Hasan, chair of the
Consortium of Bengali Associations. 'Corruption is everywhere, it is the history.
Developing countries always have these problems. Officials in both Britain
and Bangladesh need to work together and be more active on such matters.'
BD Foods categorically rejects any allegation
that it is linked to the front companies exporting heroin to the UK and points
out that VAT numbers are easy to copy in Bangladesh. In a written statement
to The Observer, the company claims a 'vicious circle' of criminals have taken
advantage of its good name. 'None of our sister concerns have or had any link
with any type of drug smuggling or any of the [front] companies. These allegations
are based on a primary report... which was prepared about seven or eight months
ago. After the investigation, the related authorities did not find any proof
against us and the government did not file any legal case against us.'
The company has now written to the British
High Commission to point out that there has never been a problem with any
of its consignments exported to Britain. It has also called for 'a proper
investigation to find out the culprits' who have been using its tax certificates
to obtain export licences. And it has fired one of its employees, whom it
believes was orchestrating the operation.
There have been some noticeable successes
as a result of intelligence shared between the Bangladeshi and British authorities.
Mirza Hamayou Shaukat, 45, is serving 15 years after customs tracked the heroin
hidden in the floor tiles from Southampton to his home in Birmingham. This
month, a specialist customs team flew to Bangladesh to gather intelligence
which may yet yield further arrests. But these are small victories in an unremitting
war against the heroin exporters, who have now found a new conduit for their
toxic product.
'We are acutely aware of the problem, but
it is unfortunate that I cannot say more,' said a spokesman for the British
High Commission in Bangladesh.
Close to the 'Golden Crescent' - the remote
and far-flung parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where most of the world's
heroin is produced - Bangladesh is well placed to act as a conduit for the
drug trade. And the real concern now is that the country's burgeoning business
in exporting heroin is symptomatic of a wider problem, one that is about to
become increasingly urgent following this year's poppy harvest in Afghanistan.
'Early signs for 2006 indicate that opium
cultivation is up in 13 provinces,' the UN's Lewis said. 'Villagers appear
to have planted crops on a scale equal to or exceeding that of 2005, and most
of the harvesting will be over in about one month's time. It's a natural thing
for the trafficking organisations to try to find new routes out to the lucrative
markets beyond west Asia. We estimate that about one-third of the Afghan crop
exits via Pakistan. Some of this is shipped via northern India and leaves
south Asia through Bangladesh. What we saw in Bangladesh in 2005 may well
recur if the Afghan crop is again large this year.'
