CEBU - Customs police confiscated P2.4 million worth of pornographic video compact discs that came in on a Federal Express airfreighter from Malaysia the other day.
Hernando Anonas Jr., Mactan Customs police sectoral commander, said the shipment came in six boxes and were taken to a U-Freight warehouse at the airport after being unloaded.
The shipment, consigned to a certain Jose Sardane of Villagonzalo, was declared as electrical parts.
Acting on a tip, Anonas immediately dispatched a team to make a random inspection of the shipment and found it made up not of electrical parts but of pornographic VCDs.
The seizure prompted Cebu Customs district collector Rolando Yebes to suspect that Cebu, with its international airport and seaport, is being used as entry point for hot items from abroad.
Not only was the shipment misdeclared as electrical spare parts, it was also undervalued and underweighed. Each box was declared as worth $150, but Customs said the value of VCDs in each box should be worth much more than that.
The import entry also declared the total weight of the shipment as only 370 kilos when upon inspection, it was found to weigh 462 kilos.
A pirated VCD such as those now flooding the streets of Cebu fetches at most P200 for non-pornographic material and could go as high as P300 if it is pornographic. An original pornographic VCD costs about P600.