Fuel thieves bash up HPCL officer who aided probe to end pilferage

[karira]

As reported by K Praveen Kumar of TNN in The Times of India, Chennai Edition on 08 August 2008:

Fuel thieves bash up HPCL officer who aided probe to end pilferage

Chennai: The fuel mafia appears to have taken their fight against upright officers to the streets. In a shocking incident, a gang assaulted a deputy manager of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) attached to the company gantry at Tondiarpet. R Mohan, the officer, was on his way back home around 10.30 pm on Tuesday when the gang assaulted him.

Mohan was admitted to Apollo Clinic at Tondiarpet and later discharged. However, he had to be readmitted to Vijaya Hospital, Vadapalani after he complained of pain. He has lodged a complaint with the Tondiarpet police.

Mohan was attacked, evidently, because he assisted a vigilance team that probed pilferage on Tuesday. “The vigilance team had come after receiving complaints of fuel pilferage from petroleum dealers. The team discovered that many trucks which came to fill fuel from the gantry had a hidden compartment inside the truck, which they used for storing unaccounted fuel. The team caught four trucks with such hidden compartments,” Mohan told The Times Of India from his hospital bed.

He said petroleum dealers and truck drivers always asked him to provide extra fuel for each truck, which he refused. “The malpractice is happening everywhere. They were unhappy with me since I did not allow it. Added to this was the vigilance raid. Though I was not directly involved in the raid, it was part of my duty to assist the vigilance officers,” Mohan said.

The fuel mafia, according to the official, has been siphoning off fuel worth crores of rupees from gantries of various oil companies. Many of the private fuel tankers are designed for oil pilferage. Each normal truck, with a capacity of 12 kilolitres, has three compartments of 4 kilolitres each. The specially designed tankers have a hidden compartment with a capacity of 50 to 100 litres inside one of the four-kilolitre compartments, without causing space loss.

When the trucks fill the fuel from the gantry, the lid of the hidden compartment remains closed. The truck then goes to a retail outlet where the dealers check the quality and quantity of the fuel using dips. When the checks are over, the driver pulls the lid of the hidden compartment using a cable that he can access through a lever in his cabin. The chamber gets filled even as the fuel is being emptied out at the retail outlet. “The dealers suffer a loss of 50 to 100 litres of fuel per truck. The truck owners sell this in the black market,” Mohan said.

At the HPCL gantry in Tondiarpet, around 200 trucks are filled with fuel daily. The vigilance department of HPCL is now trying to check each tanker for these hidden compartments.

Added to this is the fuel theft committed by truckers and dealers in connivance with petroleum company officials. Sources said there was no mechanism available with the oil companies to measure the exact quantity of fuel in the reservoirs in the gantries. “Our tanks are so huge that we get only an approximate of the whole quantity, as we have to account for evaporation, expansion and contraction of the liquid due to temperature variation. A millimetre fall in fuel level could mean a difference of 2,000 to 3,000 litres. So a few hundreds of litres siphoned off by a truck driver may go unnoticed,” a petroleum company official said.

MODUS OPERANDI

The specially designed tankers have a hidden space with a capacity of 50–100 litres, inside the main compartment



The driver pulls the lid of the hidden compartment using a cable (in red). The chamber gets filled even as the fuel is being emptied out at the retail outlet



The fuel that is illegally filled in the secret compartment (in blue) is sold in the black market