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Police Release Confiscated Motorola Telephones
Law enforcement organs returned $16-million worth of confiscated Motorola cellular telephones to the Euroset company yesterday. Observers consider this a powerful victory of business over police racketeering. Law enforcement's campaign to seize imported electronic products has been stopped after almost a year. It cost the market hundreds of millions of dollars.
Press secretary of Motorola's Moscow office Kirill Lubnin stated that “we received notification from the prosecutor of Moscow that criminal case No. 376274 on the seizure on March 29 from the Euroset Opt company of 167,500 cellular telephones has been closed for lack of elements of a crime. In connection with that, 117,500 telephones have been returned to their owner.” The remaining 50,000 telephones, worth about $2.4 million, were found to be harmful to the health of users and destroyed on April 25. Euroset declined to comment on the situation yesterday. The Interior Ministry and prosecutor also declined to comment.
The seizure of the telephones was a public scandal at the beginning of April. Euroset announced that agents of the Interior Ministry's K Bureau confiscated a lot of telephones worth $19 million from it. The police from Bureau K called the telephones pirated and threatened to destroy them. When Motorola's Moscow office confirmed the legality of the telephones, the police changed their story and called the Motorola C115 dangerous and destroyed 50,000 of them.
The conflict grew to an international scale when Motorola defended its model and drew the U.S. embassy and trade representatives into the case. And then nothing more was heard from the police. A warehouse containing $30 million worth of home appliances belonging to the Tekhnosila that was sealed two weeks after the seizure of the telephones was unsealed quietly. “The impression is made that someone from above ordered the police to stop after the Euroset scandal broke out,” commented analyst Eldar Murtazin of the Mobile Research Group. Murtazin added that the proportion of legal telephone imports increased from 10-15 percent to 70-75 percent in the last year.
by
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 25, 2006
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