A Rs 100-crore racket has been unearthed in which jewellers are importing iridium to mix with gold to increase its weight, reports Mid Day.
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) officials seem to have stumbled upon this golden goos, the report said.
The seizure of 15 kilograms of iridium from the foreign post office located near Santacruz airport on April 7 by DRI's B-Cell was what alerted officials.
Earlier, the consignment was wrongly declared as industrial chemical, but a chemical test subsequently disclosed that it was iridium.
The importer, NGK Enterprises was asked to pay a fine of Rs 5 crore which was duly complied, a fact confirmed by a DRI superintendent.
Mixing iridium with pure gold hides the purity of the latter, which helps jewellers make quick money, since the purity and physical appearance of gold cannot be challenged after the precious metal is mixed with the chemical (iridium).
Fatehchand Ranka, president, Maharashtra Rajya Saraf Mahamandal, confirmed that it is virtually impossible to detect iridium in gold, "There is no such procedure yet."
Ranka did not rule out the possibility that jewellers have been mixing iridium with gold. "But only a few of them are doing it," he added.
Other theory doing the rounds in the customs department is that gold prices are likely to rise in the next few months. This is mainly due to depleted stocks of gold in treasuries across the globe.
While iridium costs around Rs 8 lakh per kilogram, 99.9 per cent pure gold is sold at Rs 16,865 and 99.5 per cent gold is sold at Rs 16,770 for 10 grams, which would mean approximately Rs 16.7 lakh per kilogram.
So, for example, if you buy 20-30 gms of gold, chances are that around 5-10 per cent of it would be iridium, and other substances, which are almost impossible to detect, unless you are ready to re-melt your jewellery.
DRI investigators suspect that some customs officials and clearing house agents have been involved in importing iridium worth more than Rs 100 crore in the past few months. The case is being handed over to the CBI.
Iridium is a very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum family, and the second densest element (after osmium) and is the most corrosion-resistant metal, even at temperatures as high as 2000 C.
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