200lbs of cocaine – an aristocrat sugar trader’s nightmare

This article introduced us to a new freight phrase: “rip-off modality”. This is defined as a genuine shipment that has been tampered with by criminals to conceal contraband, without the knowledge of cargo owners, forwarder or carrier. It is thought that describes 90kg of cocaine found in a container at the Kenyan port of Mombasa, which was unloaded from an MSC vessel from Santos, Brazil’s major gateway, which has seen six times as much cocaine seized by authorities this year than in the entirety of 2015. The cocaine was hidden in a shipment of sugar owned by trader ED&F Man, which led Kenyan authorities to arrest Nairobi-based Brit (the aristocrat mentioned in the headline) Jack Alexander Wolf Marrian, the company’s managing director in the country. His container – his cocaine… except that in the murky world of rip-offs, that assumption is hardly ever true.

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