Bangladeshi customs officials have yet to discover the concept of a seizure auction:
Hundreds of people watched as officials from the National Board of Revenue (NBR) used bulldozers to crush a Mercedes Benz and a Toyota car and other luxury goods at a railway container terminal in Dhaka. NBR chairman Khairuzzaman Chowdhury said a trading firm had sought to evade customs duties by falsely declaring that the container carried iron scrap. "They wanted to befool us by saying they brought in scrapped metals…so we are giving them the same. They, or anyone like them, will not forget this," he told reporters at the site. [Reuters/Yahoo!]
Reuters/Yahoo!: Declaring cars as scrap? Dhaka customs makes it true
Update: BBC News has a small photo of the glorious event.
That’s friggin HARSH!!! One hell of a way to say “don’t mess with Bangladeshi customs.”
Yeah that was harsh. If these were auctioned and the money forfeited then it could do some good to tackle the Govts. deficit budget.
The destruction of those Mercedes was unnecessary according to me. The labors who destroyed them might never know the real value of it. Perhaps they were having a feeling of hatred against the bourgeois.
The event was lauded by some Bangladeshis. http://blog.imtiaz.info/2005/04/26/sabash-bangladesh-two-luxury-cars-scraped-on-tax-evasion/
This NBR chairman seems to be one man of principal which is hard to find in the tax and customs departments. Recently he deposited one Rolex Oyster to govt. treasury gifted to him by one businessman during a meeting. He seems to be the lonely flower in the swamp.
And the tragedy is he wouldn’t be able to do anything drastic if the fraud importer was one of the kin of the ruling party MP or Ministers. And he alone cannot stop the massive corruptions in the customs department.
He tried to teach a lesson. But we know that nobody takes any lesson from history.