A shipment declared as fruit punch didn’t turn out to have a sweet ending for the people responsible for the consignment — vigilant Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officers found out that they were actually cartons upon cartons of beer.
Duty-unpaid beer, to be precise, and 69,048 cans of it. Alcoholic beverages, as you might be familiar with, are one of the higher taxed goods in Singapore — importers have to fork out S$16 per litre of alcohol in customs duty if they’re bringing the drinks from foreign countries. The total amount of duty-unpaid for the shipment of beer amounted to about S$86,580, according to ICA.
Meanwhile, the Goods and Services Tax for the beer was S$20,140. Which just means that that’s a lot of money owed to the authorities.
On a serious note, ICA reminded the public that this method of concealment is quite worrying as “it may be used by people with ill intent to smuggle security items into Singapore.” Investigations into the attempted smuggling are ongoing.
