Police in Poland have seized over 39 million cigarettes and arrested five suspects in a major operation backed by Europol.
Officers from the Gdańsk Bureau of the Polish Central Bureau of Investigation (CBŚP) and the Gdańsk Prosecutor’s office began investigating the transnational cigarette smuggling network in 2015.
Since then, authorities in Poland have been sharing intelligence on the gang with Europol, as well as British and Italian law enforcement agencies.
This cooperation resulted in the discovery of some 14 million cigarettes that were intended for the black market in the Italian town of Caserta in 2015, followed by the seizure of another 13 million cigarettes in Padua, and a further 12 million in Trieste, both also in Italy.
The gang, which was reported to have been made up of Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Britons, Belgians, Greeks and Italians, avoided paying excise duty on legally-made cigarettes, allowing them to make large profits by selling them on the black market in Europe tax free.
In a statement, Europol said: “Excise fraud deprives member states of revenue that would otherwise be used to fund vital public services such as schools, hospitals and infrastructure.
“A crime enabler or threat financer that facilitates organised crime groups to commit other serious crime, it is also a threat to national security.”
Last month, professional services firm KPMG released its annual report on the illicit tobacco trade in the EU, Norway and Switzerland.
Project SUN revealed that the consumption of counterfeit and contraband cigarettes in the EU was estimated at 8.7% of total consumption in 2017, accounting for 44.7 billion cigarettes.
The study found that the consumption of counterfeit and contraband cigarettes fell by 7.4% last year, dropping at a faster rate than legal domestic consumption, which declined by 2.5% over the same period.
The report revealed that Ukraine, Belarus, Algeria and Moldova are the main identifiable sources of smuggled cigarettes in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland.
Despite the decline, cigarette smuggling remains an attractive activity for organised crime networks, not least due to the fact that it offers high profits, and carries lower risks than other crimes such as drug trafficking and people smuggling.
In a statement released to coincide with the publication of the study, the Royal United Services Institute, which worked on the report with KPMG, said: “[T]he profits from cigarette smuggling can be just as significant as those attached to higher-risk crime: illicit cigarettes are cheap to produce, lightweight and easy to move, and benefit from strong consumer demand.”
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