He said they are now parked at the Interpol offices in Kololo and at the Uganda Revenue Authority-URA offices in Nakawa.
“These cars had already been purchased by Ugandans. That is why we are asking Ugandans to always find out how the cars are brought here. Come to Interpol and crosscheck before you lose your money. Some are just bought and once they are brought here for verification, they test positive,” Obwana said.
According to URN “The vehicles include; four Range Rover Sport, each valued at Shs 500 million, as well as several Discovery vehicles, and Toyota Hilux pickups estimated to cost between Shs 200 and Shs 350 million. All the cars at both Interpol and URA were manufactured between 2017 and 2020, and were shipped to Uganda from Dubai, where they were taken after being stolen.”
Interviewed for this story, Charles Birungi, a senior commissioner of police and director Interpol Uganda, said international police tracks stolen cars flagged in the Interpol database and also handles cases that are brought for verification.
“We can only know that these are stolen vehicles from other countries when they are brought for verification and we have heavy deployment along borders ready to intercept any stolen car. We carry out thorough checks on vehicles leaving and entering the country,” Birungi said.
According to a BBC report, “…hundreds of thousands of cars are brought in and out of Southampton docks every year, and police says, stolen vehicles being shipped out for sale in Africa is a major problem for the UK.”
The report says that after an international operation “some three quarters of a million pounds worth of stolen vehicles have been recovered here.”
The report says that the haul of stolen vehicles was flagged after one stolen car provided a clue.
“Finally arriving back on UK soil, this stolen car provided the clue which placed the police on the trail. A company which looks after fleet vehicles had installed trackers in cars given to customers,” the report says.
In May last year, the tracker in this car alerted the company it had been taken some where it shouldn’t. Neil Thomas, who works with APU Limited, the UK’s leading provider of accident investigation and asset protection services, says “the car was telling us it was in a container in Le Havre on a harbor in France. So that raised a lot suspicion from my point of view…We tried to contact our client to make sure he wasn’t on a cruise over there or going to France and he wasn’t, he hasn’t spoken to us since.”
“They continued tracking the car and found it was taken from Le Havre over to Oman in the Middle East from there it was moved to Mombasa in Kenya and finally over the border into Uganda,” a BBC reporter said.
“Police travelled to Uganda to catch up with the stolen car and found it in compound in the capital, they found not only that car but many more. These stolen twenty eight British vehicles mostly Range Rovers and Audis all had their details changed and were ready to be sold on to Ugandan buyers,” the report said.
Asked how easy was it for the thieves to ship these cars out there, Detective Constable Nathan Ricketts, of the national vehicle crime intelligence service, said, “to ship vehicles out unfortunately is very easy for criminal groups…You don’t have to have much details or any identifications or things like that to export people’s cars,”.
Over the past four years, the national vehicle crime intelligence service says it has seen about seven million pounds worth of stolen cars being exported out of Southampton alone.
The BBC report further explains that many such car thieving groups are still operational in the UK with vehicles being stolen on order for customers in Cyprus, Africa and eastern Europe and have become astute at blocking conventional anti-theft tracking units leaving the insurance industry with increased risk and no alternative but to pass the costs on to the consumer with higher premiums.
Twelve insurers including; Admiral, Allianz, Aviva and Zenith, were victims of the Ugandan car theft ring. East Africa’s car theft syndicates are also expanding their networks to the United Kingdom. Less than 2% of the world’s containers are checked at ports of entry.
From April to July 2019, 16 high-end cars stolen and smuggled from the UK were intercepted at Kenya’s port of Mombasa. Disguised in shipping containers as household goods en route to Uganda, the cars had their chassis numbers cloned to evade detection by authorities.
WHAT CAR DEALERS SAY
Musoke Denis, a car bond owner in Nakawa, said Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is more concerned about tax clearance than car theft issues. Once the tax is cleared, the payer, whether a thief or not, takes full ownership of the vehicle.
“Car thefts happen and will always happen until authorities responsible restructure their policies. The car syndicate targets those expensive cars like Range Rovers and, BMWs…” he added.
Ssembatya, who works with J and M bond in Nakawa, said, “Rules regulating car bonds are weak and authorities hardly carry out inspections in these different car bonds because once one secures the license for buying and selling cars within and outside Uganda there’s hardly any intermediary authority to oversee the transaction or negotiations and eligibility of players involved.”
Hamza Kamya, a former car dealer, said the car theft syndicate involves lots of invisible players in Europe, where the cars are ordered from, to the Kenyan port of Mombasa and then to Uganda.
“Africans living abroad, more-so, with dual citizenship, are mainly the target because they’re looked at as individuals that won’t put much effort in following up their stolen cars, which has created a capital base for traffickers and their other players to continuously move stolen cars to Africa” Hamza added.
“Some of the spare parts garage businesses in town started as car bonds in Uganda but due to the high taxes they switched to dealing in spare parts. And most of these parts are stolen from cars within and outside Uganda…A truck full of spare parts can cross borders with forged importation spare parts documents. Immigration and customs officials are also sometimes involved…” Hamza said.
“Once in another country the parts are sold at open-air markets. In Kenya, they’re sold in the Kariobangi area in Nairobi, in Uganda it’s in Katwe in Kampala, and in Tanzania, it’s the Gerezani area in Dar es Salaam. From Tanzania and Uganda, some spare parts are moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi,” he said.
“Kakamega County in Kenya is the den of car thieves and I am sure about 40% of car dealers in Uganda have ever gotten cars or spare parts from those places and a lot is always at play at the border points because once a vehicle is stolen, criminals redecorate it and strip off its number plates and place fake number plates,” Hamza said.
PROCESS OF CAR SHIPMENT
Cars are typically exported to Mombasa where they are collected by local Kenyan/ Ugandan agents, and then a company can arrange for the clearance of the vehicle when it arrives in Kampala.
Ships take approximately 25 days to get to Mombasa from the UK. There are two main methods of shipping vehicles from the UK: RoRo Car Shipping to Uganda from the UKRORO Shipping.
RoRo is short for “Roll on Roll off ” and is the simplest, cheapest, and most popular method of shipping. Vehicles are driven into the ship and securely fixed to the ship’s deck, and when the ship arrives, they are driven out of the ship. Putting personal goods in the vehicles is usually not permitted when shipping by RoRo.
Container shipping is where vehicles are secured in a container, which is then loaded onto the ship. Container shipping is a more expensive but secure option and is ideal if you are sending high-value vehicles or if you are sending other items with your car, such as household goods or spare parts.
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