JPJ officers nabbed for smuggling out road tax stickers and issuing forged grants for cloned cars

We recently read about the Road Transport Department (JPJ) busting cloned car syndicates and devising new systems to stop people from selling cloned cars. Now, the Negeri Sembilan Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has detained JPJ insiders for aiding the cloned car trade.

Bernama reports that over 10,000 blank road tax stickers were smuggled out of JPJ in Negeri Sembilan between November 2014 and March 2015. The state MACC also discovered that 1,500 car grants had been issued without authorisation, for cloned and smuggled cars.

Two JPJ officers were among four individuals detained by MACC in separate Ops Photostatraids last week. The three men and one woman, aged between their early 20s and 30s, included middlemen. Investigations revealed that the syndicate had sold the original road tax stickers for between RM450 and RM800 each, and forged car grants for up to RM1,200 each.

The state’s MACC director Shaharom Nizam Abd Manap confirmed the report. He added that investigations were continuing, and urged owners of cloned cars to surrender their vehicles voluntarily to the MACC’s office to avoid action. To date, 16 smuggled vehicles (believed to be scrap cars from a neighbouring country) have been seized and 11 suspects arrested in operations conducted last month.