Customs officer, hawaldar get 3 years in jail for accepting ₹5-K bribe

A Mumbai court sentences an Air Customs superintendent and a hawaldar to three years in prison for accepting a bribe of ₹4,000 from a cinematographer.

Mumbai: A special CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) court has sentenced an Air Customs superintendent and a hawaldar posted at the airport to three years of imprisonment for accepting a bribe of ₹4,000 from a cinematographer to grant export certificates for the cameras and other equipment that he was carrying to Qatar.

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The complainant, Omkar Raut, in his statement, told the CBI that Air Customs superintendent Vasudev Ninave had demanded ₹5,000 from him and his friend Punit Desai for issuing export certificates for the camera equipment, which they were carrying while travelling to Qatar. He added that after negotiation, on Ninave’s instructions, Desai handed over ₹4,000 to Customs hawaldar JS Mondkar in the washroom at terminal T-2 at the departure lounge of the airport.

The case was, however, registered on February 18, 2019, after Raut and Desai returned to India. It was claimed that when Desai was bribing Mondkar, Raut had made a video of the incident on his mobile phone. The CBI recovered the footage from Raut’s phone, which was used as evidence against the accused.

Besides, CCTV footage from the Customs (Air Cargo) also showed that the accused met Desai, thereafter, Desai went to the washroom where Mondkar followed him to collect the bribe amount. The CBI had obtained sanctions to prosecute the two before registering the FIR.

In their defence, the Customs personnel questioned the sanction, saying it was mechanically given without application of mind. However, the court noted that the sanctioning authority had granted prosecution sanction only after considering all the evidence gathered by CBI against the two.

Besides, the court also discarded their objections to accepting the video recorded by Raut as evidence against them and said that the accused were identified in the video. The court, while convicting the Customs officer and the hawaldar, said, “The two accused had no explanation about the incident and sequence of events as captured in CCTV camera and later in the video recorded on the phone by Raut.”