Smugglers' New Year's plans blow up in smoke: OLAF helps seize over 75 million cigarettes at the turn of the year

A long journey came to its end in the first month of 2016: European cigarettes which had legally set sail to Asia ended up finding their way back into Europe - this time, illegally. During an operation which lasted several months, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) worked closely with Greek and Cypriot authorities to track the shipment and seize more than 33 million cigarettes in Greece. This was the largest of five operations in which a total of more than 75 million cigarettes were seized in Greece, Russia, Germany and Spain between December 2015 and January 2016.

 

OLAF's promising start to the year builds on the remarkable results the office achieved in 2015, when over 600 million cigarettes were seized.

 

"Once again, the numbers show the excellent work and perseverance of our investigators, as well as the undeniable importance of European cooperation in this field," OLAF Director-General Giovanni Kessler said.  OLAF brings real added value by providing its operational partners with key information on the movement of such goods and these efforts are showing clear results," he added.

 

All the cigarettes seized in these operations were so-called "cheap-whites". They were mostly Richman, Royal, RGD and Jim, although new brands have also surfaced, such as the Vietnamese brand Aroma.

 

Cheap whites: a long way from home

 

Smuggled cigarettes cross borders, sometimes continents, and often pass through different ports before finding their way onto the European market. This was the case for more than 8 million Vietnamese Aroma cigarettes that came from Asia to the Port of Barcelona.

 

The Aegean Sea was the target of two of OLAF's biggest operations this season. Thanks to the close cooperation with the Greek General Secretariat against corruption (AFCOS Greece), Greek and Cypriot customs, 33 million cigarettes, were seized at the end of January. An additional seizure of almost 21 million cigarettes had already taken place at the Port of Piraeus, bringing the total number of seized cigarettes in Greece in the course of these 2 recent investigations to over 55 million.

 

Roughly 10 million cigarettes were also seized at the port of Hamburg last month and another 3 million were confiscated during an operation in Russia, after a trip via Rotterdam and Riga.

 

In all these cases,...
the cigarettes had not been declared as such and, as all too often, were concealed amongst other imported products, such as blankets, sunglasses and ceramics.

 

Although most of this month's seizures took place in harbours smugglers take diverse routes to perpetrate their illegal activities. Just last week, other OLAF intelligence led to the arrest of four individuals at Madrid airport and one at London airport. Travelling from the Ukraine, the smugglers carried over 150,000 cheap whites. Once again, OLAF made sure that there are no free rides when it comes to cigarette smuggling.

 

http://ec.europa.eu/anti_fraud/media-corner/press-releases/press-releases/2016/20160205_01_en.htm