Sparks fly over JIA theft

9 Feb 2001 - By Staff reporter

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Agents and handlers
lock horns

Leonard Neill

AN INTERNATIONAL crime syndicate has targeted Johannesburg International Airport and has been responsible for the theft of millions of rands worth of electronic equipment from cargo centre warehouses in the past year, say freight agents and ground handlers who are currently locked in a myriad of costly insurance claims.
Computers and cellphones have been top of the list. Huge consignments of these have landed at JIA and disappeared from warehouses before agents have had time to clear them.
Agents have blamed ground handlers, with closed circuit camera recordings providing evidence of items being removed. But the handlers claim that while shipments are consigned to their warehouses, they are unaware of their contents and value prior to landing.
It is the agents who have all the details, said a representative of one of the handlers from whose warehouses large consignments have disappeared. We are merely advised of packages coming in, but have no knowledge of their contents until arrival on our doorstep. Agents have people at both ends of the chain who know what is being flown, and the syndicates at work can target any load long before it touches down here.
In the ongoing battle between handlers and agents, Airfreight Express has been provided with a dossier of letters between the two groups showing that the theft of hi-tech goods has been continuing for more than a year.
The handlers' reply merely states they are aware, without prejudice, of the missing consignment, said a leading Johannesburg importer of electronic equipment. They hide behind the insurance coverage of US$20 per kilogram lost, but that represents only about 10% of our total loss in the deal. We are losing out hand over fist in this matter, and little is being done about it.
In an instance towards the end of January, a
consignment of camera equipment weighing 172kg was found to have gone missing when the agent produced air waybills for clearance. They were then shown a bill of release on which signatures unknown to them appeared .
It was definitely forged, said the importer, so we called for the closed circuit film to be shown to us. There we clearly saw the forklift moving our goods out of the warehouse.
In another instance, in which copies of the correspondence have been lodged with Airfreight Express, an importer of computer items weighing 600kg was told by the handler that the shipment had been checked in at its warehouse, but could not be found when his representatives called for it.
You can gauge our shock when an outlet to which we normally supply in Pretoria phoned us two days later to say our missing goods had been offered to them. They had recognised them from the registration numbers we had circulated, but before any action could be taken the would-be suppliers had disappeared.