Romanian authorities seize nearly 75 mln smuggled cigarettes in H1

Romanian authorities have seized around 75 million smuggled cigarettes , worth RON 45 million in the first half of 2017, down by 1.3 percent compared to the end of 2016, data released by American Tobacco Romania published on Thursday shows.

“Although in the first half of 2017 the level of smuggling decreased by 1.3 percentage points compared to the end of last year, reaching 15.5 percent, we are still far from the European average of 9 percent. The smugglers respond to the intensified efforts of the authorities with increasingly surprising methods of enforcing the borders, encouraged by the high profits that illegal trafficking brings,” said Ileana Dumitru, legal and public relations director of British American Tobacco Romania.

According to the BAT representatives, the four SCUT operations carried out by the National Agency for Fiscal Administration (ANAF), through the customs authority, the activities of the Border Police, the intensification of the Romanian police controls and the completion of important crime files initiated by the DIICOT led to a drop in the volume of the illicit market in the first half of 2017.

Consequently, the Romanian authorities prevented over 20,000 packets of smuggled cigarettes daily from reaching the black market in Romania, that is, the equivalent of the total consumption of a city of about 100,000 inhabitants.