Almost 100 companies on watch list for cocaine imports into Australia

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London: Almost 100 companies operating on Australian docks and freight terminals are being monitored by authorities, who believe many of them were established as a cover for organised crime gangs to import record amounts of cocaine, other illicit drugs and illegal goods.

As customs officers plan a fresh crackdown on the nation’s ports, Australian Border Force has revealed the size of the watch list compiled through Operation Jardena – its effort to identify and combat trusted insiders in the supply chain – has ballooned to about 1000 individuals and more than 90 businesses working at the border.

Shipping containers are offloaded in the Port of Antwerp, Belgium. With thousands of containers reaching Antwerp every day, the Belgian port city is one of Europe’s main ports of entry to Europe for cocaine. Credit: AP

Law enforcement agencies struggling to keep up with a massive uptick in cocaine shipments to Australia in the past year are set to partner with international customs authorities and businesses to gain access to real-time shipment data to increase efforts to disrupt drug smuggling operations throughout a “corrupted” supply chain of air cargo, baggage handlers, stevedores, freight forwarders and maritime crews.

Australians are prepared to pay among the highest prices in the world for cocaine, making it a lucrative market for powerful drug cartels. This masthead recently revealed that Albanian mafia cells in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne are among those suspected of importing tonnes of cocaine into Australia.

Cocaine is also believed to be what is fuelling a bloody gang war in Sydney, with five people shot in five days last week, with senior police saying it is a “territorial conflict” being waged to supply the city’s multi-million dollar fixation with the drug. 

Throughout the past calendar year, there has been a series of large detections of attempted cocaine importations, both onshore and offshore. Border Forces officials had seized 4.5 tonnes of cocaine this year as of the end of April alone. The highest amount in any of the previous five years was 2.5 tonnes.

Recent cocaine importations into Australia.

As Europe, particularly Belgium and the Netherlands, deals with a huge surge in cocaine trafficking, outbreaks of street violence and threats on the lives of public justice officials, Australian Border Force commissioner Michael Outram said his agency would work with international partners in renewed efforts to target organised crime gangs.

While Outram said that Border Force had doubled its strike rate in detecting illicit drugs crossing the border in recent years, wastewater testing still indicated about 75 to 80 per cent of illicit drugs were succeeding in getting across the border.

“In other words, despite the thousands of tonnes per year of drugs we are stopping, even on a good day we’re stopping only about 20 to 25 per cent of them,” he said in an interview following meetings with the Border Five in Brussels. “So we have to do better.”

A wide range of drug traffic gangs, including those with a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities, continue to supply the Australian cocaine market. Authorities have disrupted several large shipments since January originating from South America which have come through several other ports in Europe, Asia and the Pacific. In all around 43 international ports have been placed on a high-risk list.

The surge in supply is also outstripping domestic demand, with several markets being flooded not only because of the increase in opioids in the United States, but increased coca cultivation in several countries. From 2020 to 2021, cultivation went up 35 per cent, a record high and the sharpest year-to-year increase since 2016, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime recently warned.

The increase in cultivation was accompanied by the rise in land cultivated in South America – a 300,000 hectares increase between 2020 and 2021. Production has also increased due to advances in how the drug is chemically processed before being ready for sale.

Outram said while details of the second phase in the operation remained sensitive and confidential, it was his aim to put many of the Australian businesses linked with trafficking and organised crime out of business. But he said it would also need a more sophisticated approach into the future and greater partnerships with both legitimate private cargo and freight companies and international partners.

“At the same time, we’re going to see an over 70 per cent increase in cargo imports here in Australia over the next 10 years, so the challenges and the logistics will be huge, and they’ll continue to increase,” he said.

He said there was an urgent need for border modernisation and investment in the border, both financial and strategic and policymakers needed to reframe how we think about making significant policy decisions about it.

He said while it was unlikely the government would increase funding for more officers on the group to match the increase in cargo loads, the agency was planning to secure new contactless screening systems, which would involve the country of departure sharing X-rays with Australia.

Outram said having the capabilities to screen goods as they arrived in the country through detection technologies in almost real time would be a “game-changer” on the docks, mail centres and freight and passenger flights.

“Think of the benefits of real-time screening as cargo is brought on board ships and aircraft,” he said. “Time and money would be saved, and we would have a very high degree of confidence around what was originally loaded into a container and its chain of security all the way to the end customer.”

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