A probe into the disappearance of a consignment from the Mumbai Port has unearthed a series of thefts from the citys oldest trade hub,with a number of clearing agents,insurance surveyors and surface transport agents apparently involved. In April,the port cargo shed superintendent wrote to the Yellow Gate police station about missing cargo: steel plates from an offshore installation,worth lakhs. Later,a clearing agent allegedly confessed,not only that he had forged documents to take the cargo out of the port,but also that he had done this a number of times. Once,he allegedly confessed,he had taken a 12-tonne steel plate,tried to sell it at the Kurla scrapyard,failed to find buyers and brought it back and parked it in the cargo shed from where he had taken it. Following the revelation,the Yellow Gate police tracked how many such complaints had been made and found that the letter they had received was the 53rd sent this year to the Mumbai Police. On June 12,the police got another complaint,that eight plates of steel had gone missing. The consignment had arrived in the ship New Giant on May 28 and had been cleared from the port on June 2. According to the company that imported the plates,it had ordered 38. The probe found a series of tampered data entries,from the time the consignment arrived to the container shed to the gate pass. Initially,it was recorded that 30 plates had left the port. The police said that during the probe,they realised that the records were being fudged to show that all 38 plates had indeed left the port. The police checked the records of the transporting agencies,found varying figures from point to point and concluded that someone had tampered with the documents to steal eight steel plates before the consignment left the port. It is not so much the number of steel plates that we are working on as the organised manner in which the records are being tampered with. It means this has been happening for some time, an officer said. Two gate inspectors,Vishwanath Kargutkar,40,and Bhaguram Talegaokar,53,have been arrested. Rahul Asthana,Port Trust chairman,said he can comment only after he looks into the case details.
