In Klaipėda, border guards prevented an illegal cigarette shipment of impressive value from reaching its destination. Two men ended up in custody after VSAT officers caught them in the northern part of the port city transferring pallets of cigarettes from one truck to another. The value of the cargo, including all mandatory taxes payable in Lithuania, is nearly 1.4 million euros.
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On Saturday afternoon, officers from the Criminal Intelligence Department of the VSAT Coastal Border Guard Unit and the Port Border Guard Station noticed suspicious activity in the northern part of Klaipėda. Here, pallets with boxes were being loaded by hand lift from a MAN truck with a trailer registered in Poland onto a Scania truck with Danish license plates.
pallets with boxes were being loaded by hand lift from a MAN truck with a trailer registered in Poland onto a Scania truck with Danish license plates.
The officers found a total of 448 boxes containing 224,000 packs of cigarettes without excise stamps: 144,000 “Winston Slender”, 48,000 “Marlboro”, 16,000 “Marlboro Gold”, and 16,000 “Prince Red”.
The value of such cargo, including all mandatory taxes payable in Lithuania, is nearly 1.4 million euros.
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During the operation, border guards detained two men – a 44-year-old resident of the Kaunas district and a 48-year-old Belarusian citizen. The latter was legally in Lithuania, had a residence permit in Poland, and claimed to work there as a driver for a logistics company.
An investigation into illegal handling of excise goods has been initiated at the VSAT Criminal Investigations Department’s Pre-trial Investigation Division, led by a prosecutor from the Klaipėda District Prosecutor’s Office Criminal Prosecution Division. Such criminal activity is punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to eight years under the law.
Both detainees were placed in custody.
On Monday, the court imposed preventive measures: detention for two months for the Lithuanian and one month for the Belarusian.
It has been established that counterfeit cigarettes of well-known global brands and even Belarusian cigarettes are also produced in underground factories operating in Latvia, several of which have already been shut down by officers. Border guards do not rule out that the seized tobacco in Klaipėda may also have come from the neighboring country.
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