The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times: "The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade Zone on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. One of the world’s biggest free zones, with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses, it is a place where billions of dollars in goods are unloaded, stored and either sold or reshipped free of tariffs. From there, 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into the Panamanian market, without proper certification, mixed in with animal products, investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries."

"As reports from around the world mounted, Chinese officials showed they were not immune to the criticism. When the makers of Sensodyne tracked counterfeit toothpaste through the Dubai Free Trade Zone to a factory in Shejiang Province in China, regulators there shut it down, a spokesman for Sensodyne said. The government also closed the chemical company that made the poison used in the toxic Panamanian cough syrup."


Wow: free trade zones were the blackmarket network that moved (and seemed to make possible) the chinese toothpaste debacle.