East African police chiefs push for blacklisting dealers in counterfeit products
Kampala, Uganda (PANA) - Dealers in counterfeit products should be blacklisted and banned from import-export business in the East Africa region, regional police bosses have resolved.
The resolution of the police chiefs was communicated Wednesday in Kampala by a spokesperson of the Uganda [Police Force, while responding to a question about what the government is doing to fight counterfeit products that have flooded the Ugandan market.
“Inspector Generals of Police from the region resolved on April 9 that we blacklist dealers in counterfeits,” Mr Patrick Onyango, the spokesperson of Kampala Metropolitan Police, told a news conference in the Ugandan capital.
In line with the resolution, Mr Onyango said, Uganda’s Inspector General of Police Martin Okoth Ochola and Interpol Uganda have sanctioned crackdown operations on counterfeits and are hunting down dealers in the same.
An assortment of suspected counterfeit products, Mr Onyango said, had already been taken to the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) for testing, and after confirming that they are indeed counterfeit, the dealers will be arrested.
Statistics by UNBS show that 54% of products on the Ugandan market are either fake or substandard.
In 2017, 232 metric tons of counterfeit goods worth about US$500,000 were seized by UNBS and another 48 tons worth about $250,000 were destroyed between July and December 2017.
-0- PANA EM/AR 17Apr2019
