Customs Seize Illegal Cigarettes Worth €3.1m

Source from:  independent.ie By Tom Brady Security Editor Wednesday January 30 2008  02/02/2008

Customs officers seized nine million contraband cigarettes yesterday -- almost a seventh of the overall total for last year. The seizure was made at Dublin Port following a container-profiling operation by officers and a scan by the Customs X-ray team. The cigarettes, which were branded "Raquel" and had an estimated street value of €3.1m, were hidden in a 45-foot container that had arrived from Belgium. The contents of the container were listed as "household goods" on the ship's manifest and were consigned to a fictitious company in Co Monaghan. A Customs spokeswoman said the potential loss to the Exchequer was about €2.5m and investigations into the haul were ongoing. Battle The seizure brings the total seizures by Customs at Dublin Port and Dublin Airport this year to 9.6m cigarettes and 107 kilos of tobacco, in what officers describe as their continuing battle with Irish and Eastern European smuggling gangs. Last year, Customs captured an overall total of 70m cigarettes, worth €24m, and 1,335kg of tobacco, worth €380,000. Earlier this month, officers targeted passengers disembarking from a flight into Dublin from the Latvian capital, Riga, and seized some 112,000 cigarettes. The operation was one of a series of strikes carried out by Customs against Eastern European gangs illegally bringing in cigarettes and tobacco through Dublin Airport. Two days later, officers seized 167,800 cigarettes and 2.2kg of tobacco after a search of luggage on a flight from Tenerife in the Canary Islands. They believe a Northern Ireland gang was behind that smuggling attempt and that the shipment was destined for sale on the black market on both sides of the border. A further 27,000 cigarettes were taken from passengers on another flight from Tenerife. Threat Last week, the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Frank Daly, warned that the threat posed to the Exchequer from organised cigarette smuggling was significant. He said the Revenue was more concerned about drug and cigarette smugglers passing through airports than shoppers coming back from the United States with cheap clothes and electronic goods. Mr Daly pointed out that its customs officers had challenged almost 7,000 passengers coming off flights at Dublin, Shannon and Knock airports and searched almost 4,600 pieces of baggage in the two-and-a-half months leading up to Christmas. But only 118 passengers were found to have exceeded the €175 duty limit and €23,000 of unpaid taxes were recovered. He said he was not underplaying the seriousness of wholesale shopping in the US to business in Ireland but it was essentially a two-month phenomenon, compared to the dangers of cigarette and drug smuggling. Enditem