News
Passport to scam and sham
He was every bit a rich mudalali ready to pay any price for antique collectibles. A colleague, pretending to be knowledgeable in artefacts, acted as his adivsor.
That was how they busted on Monday a major racket involving the sale of artefacts, this time it was a colonial passport.
It was Kollupitiya Police sub-inspector Prasad Dangalle who posed as this rich mudalali. A fellow officer of his posed as “the degree-holder,” an educated young man advising the mudalali on the historical value of antiques.
An old British passport
The investigation began over two weeks ago, SI Dangalle said, when one M. S. A. Jayantha Perera complained to the police about a stolen passport. Mr. Perera’s household owned many antiques, one of which was a vintage passport of a British colonial officer named Richard Alexander Cameron, who was Mr. Perera’s mother-in-law’s grandfather.
The passport issued on October 28, 1926, stated that Richard Cameron was a police sub-Inspector born on April 26, 1898 in the “Crown Colony of Ceylon.” The holder had used the passport to travel to Britain. When a small child of Mr. Perera’s fell ill and he needed some substantial sum of money/two million rupees for medical expenses, he decided to sell the passport, or so Mr. Perera told the police.
Three friends of Mr. Perera had told him that they knew a “white guy” who would pay two million rupees for the vintage passport. They urged him to meet them at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel. He did, and the next thing he knew, his friends had “vanished” with the passport without paying him, prompting him to complain to the police.
The police eventually apprehended the three friends, who had by then given the passport to some an “unknown group.”
SI Dangalle, posing as the mudalali, met this mysterious group at McDonald’s restaurant in Rajagiriya, offering them Rs. 1,000,000 for the passport. They refused. Only when the undercover officer upped the offer to Rs. 3,000,000 did the group agree to show the passport. The group was lured to the cash withdrawal counter at the Sampath Bank branch at Dharmapala Mawatha in Colombo 7 to complete the transaction and all six members were arrested.
The case has since garnered much public attention, due to its unusual nature as well as due to the occupations of the suspects, whom the police identified as a retired Army major of an artillery battalion, the owner of a well-known pharmacy chain, a civil engineer, a garment factory owner, the principal of Kimbissa Vidyalaya in Sigiriya and the Chief Marshal — also an ex-military man — of Peradeniya University.
The suspects were produced before the Colombo Fort Magistrate Court for attempting to sell a stolen item and for violations involving the National Archives Law, the Cultural Property Act, and the Antiquities Ordinance.
The suspects are currently out on surety bail of Rs. 1,000,000 each until the next court date on November 27.
“We suspect there were at least nine people involved,” Kollupitiya Police OIC Vajira Indrajith said. “This looks like a [smuggling] ring. They were all brokers. They had been dealing in antique things like old travel documents.”
SI Dangalle said investigations are still ongoing. However, the group is suspected to be involved in organised “big time” dealings, he added, selling “exotic-value” items such as red komarika, antique black cats, scorpions and leeches to foreigners.
“They have made quite an amount of money in past dealings,” he said. “They sell 50g of scorpions for Rs. 500,000.”
One of the suspects, Peradeniya University Chief Marshal W.A.A. Werahera, told the Sunday Times that he was just an “uninvolved” individual who only “accompanied” his friend and former batch mate, Kimbissa Vidyalaya Principal Sujeewa Aruna Bandara, to a meeting.
“I still don’t know whether it was legal or illegal to sell old, invalid passports,” he said. “I only got involved because my friend [the principal] asked me to come with him to this meeting, as I was told, some foreigners were looking for items of historical value, for an exhibition. As far as I know, these vintage passports would go for some Rs. 500,000 to Rs. 700,000.”
Mr. Bandara could not be reached for comment.
Tom Topol, a German national who describes himself as an “expert on passport history” and runs passport-collector.com, a popular website for historical travel document collectors, decried such six-figure prices demanded for British Ceylon passports as “all a scam.” (He has also issued a scam alert on his website.) He said he received some 10 or 12 e-mails from supposed “sellers” of ‘British Ceylons’ demanding “insanely” high prices. One Navichandra Gunethilleke e-mailed him an offer of US $ 4,000 (about Rs. 520,000) for a ‘British Ceylon’ Mr. Topol deemed it was worth about US $ 200 (about Rs. 26,000).
“There is no high demand. Nobody will pay the asked prices,” Mr. Topol wrote in an e-mail. “As I stated in my [website] article the real collector’s value is 200-400 US depend[ing] on condition. [Two to three] fellow collector[s] got the same requests asking 18,000 [USD] to 40,000 [USD]. Insane!”
The latest British Ceylon passport sold at the popular online auction site eBay went for US $ 427, Mr. Topol further pointed out, which amounts to about Rs. 56,000.
The police insist that the confiscated vintage passport is of important historical value protected by law, and said they have called for a valuation report from the Department of Archaeology. The Department’s Director General Dr. Senarath Dissanayaka said the matter is out of his purview because under the Antiquities Ordinance an item has to be dated prior to 1815, older than 99 years, to be considered an antique to be protected. This passport is only 88 years old.
Normally, historical travel documents such as this passport belong to private individuals who are free to trade it, National Archives Director Dr. Saroja Wettasinghe said, unless, the passport belongs to certain famous, or important, people, like a former Prime Minister.
“Colonial documents have a historical value but not necessarily national-wise importance, unless determined by the National Archives,” she added. “If someone posses a document more than 50 years old he should notify the Archives. If we have determined a document to be of national, historical importance, it cannot be taken out of the country without the Director’s permission.”
Just exactly how vintage items are valued can be tricky, and is often determined by the personal choices and desires of collectors, said Palitha Weerasinghe, Acting Assistant Director (Museum) with the Archaeology Department.
“To me, a passport like this is not worth five cents,” he said. “But to a collector, it might be a different story. Then again, we can’t necessarily put a price on personal, religious, aesthetic or historical value to a vintage item. However, who the passport holder is also matters: if it was a Bandaranaike, then there is a significant value in that.”