A £40,000 excavator that was just days from being shipped to Brazil has been seized by TER (The National Plant and Equipment Register) after being identified as stolen.
The used 21 tonne Caterpillar 320C was sold by a major auctioneer in Leeds in May to a buyer from Derbyshire. Although TER did not receive the theft data until after the event, a match was quickly made with one stolen in Coventry in January 2009. The insurer, Allianz, was immediately notified.
"As soon as we received the data from the auctioneers, we sent an investigator to the buyer's address in the centre of a Derbyshire town," says Tim Purbrick, Manager of TER, which operates Europe's largest database of owned and stolen plant and equipment.
"After some investigative work, he drove to a local industrial site where he saw a Caterpillar boom over the top of some vehicles. He went in and confirmed the machine's identity.
"When told there was a problem with the machine, the buyer said he wondered if it might still be on finance. But the news from TER was much worse. The excavator was in fact stolen."
Further investigations by TER revealed that the machine was being refurbished before being shipped to Brazil later that week.
"We informed the police in the theft county, as well as the police in the county where the party which put the excavator into the auction is based and also the Derbyshire police, who came out and seized it," said Tim Purbrick.
TER is now awaiting completion of police enquiries, after which the machine will be sold on behalf of the insurer. It is worth just over £40,000.
"This is a fantastic result for both the insurer Allianz and for the various police forces," said Tim Purbrick.
"It is a demonstration to all concerned of the application of TER's knowledge, skills and experience to recover a very valuable machine. We were also able to provide a number of intelligence leads for the police, with whom we worked with every step of the way.
"We would have preferred to have prevented the sale going through the auction, rather than disappoint a buyer and cause the auctioneer the administrative problems it will now have to deal with," he added.
"But, although we have a huge range of data sources at our disposal, we are reliant on the victims of equipment theft or their insurers reporting thefts to TER in a timely manner. In any event we were pleased to be able to recover the machine before The Boys from Brazil acquired it as, once it had left the shores of the UK for South America, the chances of being able to recover it would be below zero," he said.
