Duterte on auctioning off smuggled luxury cars: This insanity has to stop

President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday justified his decision to order the destruction of smuggled luxury cars, saying putting them up for auction would only give the smugglers an opportunity to secure them legally through the Bureau of Customs.

“The import, the consignee is fictitious. Then the corrupt office there in the Customs, the auction section and after a while, while they are being parked inside the warehouses, if the time comes for government to make the accounting, they would conduct the auction and sell it to the people who really, in the first place, were responsible for importing them. And this insanity has to stop,” Duterte said in a speech at the oath taking of newly appointed officials in Malacañang.

“So I said from now on, there will be no auction on smuggled goods. It will be destroyed once the period of redeeming it and I will take note of those people who are there,” he added.

On February 6, during the 116th anniversary of the BOC, Duterte witnessed the condemnation of the 20 smuggled cars at the Port of Manila.

Ten other smuggled vehicles were simultaneously destroyed at the Ports of Davao and Cebu.

Two days after, Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III proposed to the BOC to sell smuggled luxury cars at public auction but open only to "serious car collectors based abroad."

“Unlike cigarettes or drugs, which have no good intrinsic value to humans and which must be destroyed when confiscated, cars and other manufactured items have economic value, and luxury cars particularly have great value to serious car collectors,” Pimentel said in a statement.

“In the manufacture of these luxury cars a lot of energy has been expended, which I am sure has contributed to over-all global warming. Let us not waste the energy, resources, and intellectual effort consumed in the making of these luxury cars.”

Pimentel said the proceeds can be used to help calamity victims. —KBK, GMA News