The number of posh luxury car on the streets of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, are on the rise as the middle class in the landlocked East African country acquire a taste for the fast and furious vehicles that dot developed nations.
But the British police want to spoil the party before it even starts. The UK law enforcement agency says that stolen vehicle worth up to $610 million are finding their way into East African countries through an elaborate syndicate that even involves top custom officials.
According to a report by The Independent, British police and there counterpart in East Africa seized stolen UK vehicles worth more than $1.5 million in June alone.
Hundreds of high-value vehicles including BMWs, Range Rovers and Audis stolen from UK suburban driveways are increasingly being shipped to the Kenyan port of Mombasa, the largest in the region, via Cyprus.
“We began to see an increase in the number of cars being stolen last autumn,” Paul Stanfield, regional manager for east and southern Africa in the Intelligence and Operations Directorate of the UK’s National Crime Agency, told The Independent.
“A conservative estimate of the total value of motor vehicles stolen across England and Wales in the first three months of 2015 is around £100m, although not all are exported.”
Stanfield said that although the route for stolen vehicles from London to Kampala and other East African cities has been there for years, the department had witnessed a spike in recent months.
In a recent bust, hundreds of vehicle parts suspected to belong to 12 BMWs that were reported stolen in east London, were found in a container at the Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk, while in another, five Range Rovers, believed to have been stolen in Surrey, South Woodford and Islington, we discovered in a storage unit destined for Kenya, the Daily Mail reported.
British police said such stolen vehicles are presented to custom officials in containers as “personal good” or “furniture”. Once they get outside Britain, Stanfield says, custom officials in other countries who may have been compromised by the gangs “help get the cars through.”
Kenya’s port of Mombasa, where most of the goods going to countries like Uganda, Rwanda and Eastern Congo pass through, is the main culprit in this case.
High levels of corruption at the port as seen several instances of elephant tusks and rhino horns pass through from other countries and being seized in Asia nation. There have also been cases of huge amounts of drugs nabbed at the port or in Kenyan waters.
“Across East Africa, the problem is big. I believe we would also find vehicles stolen from the UK in Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and South Sudan, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo where law enforcement is limited,” Asan Kasingye, assistant inspector general of Police and director for Interpol and International Relations in Uganda, told The Independent.
“We are dealing with very well-organized syndicates, transporters and people within our system who register vehicles. We need cooperation across the region [and] with colleagues in the UK.”
