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Hong Kong customs officers have seized HK$100 million (US$12.9 million) worth of precious metals in two air freight smuggling cases, including 60kg (132lbs) of suspected gold disguised as alloy discs hidden inside ceramic tea trays bound for Japan in a “rarely seen” tactic. On October 3, officers at the airport inspected a shipment of 126 ceramic tea trays and found unusually heavy black metallic discs embedded in their tops. Scraping off the coating revealed a silver-coloured alloy, later confirmed to contain 30 per cent gold and 70 per cent silver, with a value of HK$20 million. Investigator Anthony Ho Ting-chun of the Customs and Excise Department’s syndicate crimes investigation bureau said on Wednesday that the sender was a shell company registered late last year, likely to have been set up to evade Japanese import taxes. He described the tactic as “rarely seen” by Hong Kong customs, adding that the perpetrators could have potentially dodged HK$2 million in duties. In a separate case on October 16, customs intercepted a shipment declared as garment materials and fabric samples bound for Vietnam. Inside were three silver-coloured bricks. After drilling, officers uncovered 80kg of suspected gold estimated to be worth HK$80 million. Ho said the smugglers in the second case used a Hong Kong logistics business and consolidated the gold with legitimate textile cargo in a bid to bypass Vietnam’s strict gold import controls. He noted that criminals had been “meticulously calculated” in their approaches. “To reduce risk and make customs enforcement more difficult, criminals are willing to increase costs by using more sophisticated smuggling methods, shifting from smuggling gold bars to creating alloys or concealing gold within other metals,” he said.
