Sri Lanka Customs has opened a wide-ranging investigation into more than 80 kilograms of gold allegedly imported illegally using money belonging to the businessman at the centre of the country’s largest alleged foreign-exchange fraud — and police teams are now trying to find it.

The inquiry concerns the owner of a gold jewellery shop in Pettah, NewsFirst reported at 7.48 a.m. on Wednesday. Initial investigations have established that he brought over 80 kilograms of gold into the country, and several police teams have begun work to locate it.

The funds used, Customs alleges, belonged to Jeffrey Mohamed — the businessman accused of siphoning large sums of US dollars out of Sri Lanka, and named in Sinhala-language filings as Jiffry Mohamed. He is currently in remand custody.

How this connects to the case already running

NewsFirst describes Mohamed as accused of setting up 36 shell companies to move dollars abroad under the guise of paying for imports.

That is the same conduct at the centre of a prosecution this desk has been following since the summer. Mohamed is among the suspects in the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court case concerning Rs 190 billion allegedly sent overseas against goods that never arrived. On 22 October, Chief Magistrate Asanga S. Bodaragama ordered him and two co-accused further remanded until 29 October — meaning he is due back in court tomorrow, the day after this investigation was disclosed.

The wider allegation is President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s claim, made on 25 June, that around US$1 billion left the country through advance payments for imports that never landed. The International Monetary Fund told the Daily Mirror last week that it had not discussed the matter with Sri Lankan authorities.

Why gold is the significant detail

Up to now the public account of this case has been about money going out — dollars wired abroad against invoices for goods that were never shipped.

A gold import run on the same money is the other half of a round trip. Gold is the classic instrument for bringing value back into a country in a form that is compact, liquid, holds its worth, and does not sit in a bank account that can be frozen. More than 80 kilograms is, at current international prices, a holding worth billions of rupees.

That is also why the search matters more than the paperwork. Customs has established on paper that the metal was brought in; the police teams are looking for where it physically went. A gold shop in Pettah — the centre of Colombo’s bullion and jewellery trade — is a place where imported gold can be worked, split and sold without leaving an obvious trail.

Not reported

The jewellery shop owner is not named, and NewsFirst does not say whether he has been arrested, questioned or produced before a court, or whether he is alleged to have known whose money he was using.

No filing gives the value of the 80kg, the period over which it was brought in, the country it came from, the declarations made at import, or whether duty was paid. Nothing is reported on how Customs established the link between the gold and Mohamed’s funds, whether any of the metal has been recovered, or whether this forms part of the existing Rs 190 billion prosecution or a separate case.

It is also not reported whether the 36 shell companies figure is the same set of entities already before the court. Earlier filings in this thread referred to 21 companies under CID investigation over an alleged US$700 million import scam, and this desk cannot say from the published record whether these are overlapping counts of the same network or distinct ones.

On sourcing

This account rests on one verified newsroom, and is a NewsFirst exclusive at the time of writing. The Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing carried nothing on the gold investigation, and a search across verified Sri Lankan outlets returned only unrelated gold-smuggling cases from earlier years — a Rs 1.1 billion BIA detection and a Rs 4.5 billion fine on 13 jewellers, both under Daily Mirror article IDs far below the outlet’s current numbering.

The spelling of the businessman’s name differs across outlets — Jeffrey in NewsFirst’s English filing, Jiffry in Hiru’s Sinhala reports. Both refer to the same remanded suspect.

Sources: NewsFirst — Customs probes illegal import of over 80kg of gold.