COLOGNE (dpa) – Organised criminal operations to smuggle cigarettes into Germany are booming like never before and cheating the state of increasing sums of tax revenues.
According to the Federal Customs Crime Agency (ZKA) in Cologne, last year 1.1 billion contraband cigarettes were seized – about 70 per cent more than in 1999. The taxes on those cigarettes, had they been properly imported, would have been 275 million marks (130 million dollars).The ZKA says a careful estimate of the tax revenue losses to Germany comes to around 1.5 billion marks per year. Insiders say that the figure may be as much as three to four billion marks. For the entire European Union, the figure goes well beyond 10 billion marks a year.“Over the past few years the smuggling and illegal commerce in untaxed cigarettes has increasingly developed into a significant field of crime in Germany,” says ZKA president Karl-Hein Matthias.“The billions of profits are kept out of the reach of the crime fighting authorities by means of shady financial transactions,” he added.Sometimes, the money from smuggled cigarettes is carted out of the country in suitcases. The money gets laundered abroad, and then comes back in the form of a financial investment in Germany. The men behind the scenes usually live abroad, mainly in tax havens.In Germany, legal cigarettes are taxed to the tune of 25 pfennigs (11 U.S. cents) per cigarette. In Britain the figure is three times that.The customs publication “Zoll aktuell” notes: “The profit prospects continue to be outstanding. As a result, part-time smugglers, adventurers and crooks are active on the German black market – but also the international elite of organised crime.”Customs agents say the unknown quantity of just how many cigarettes get smuggled is enormous.Most of the contraband still enters the E.U. from Eastern Europe. Last year alone, some 5.2 million lorries crossed the Polish and Czech borders into Germany, a huge number making it impossible to carry out careful controls of the sealed cargo holds.At the same time, the smugglers have become more and more crafty in devising hiding places among their cargoes of timber, newsprint rolls, carpets or construction materials.There is even a suspicion that the big tobacco concerns are knowingly selling cigarettes to organised crime gangs. As a result, the E.U. Commission has filed a civil suit against the U.S. companies Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds on suspicions that they are involved in the cigarette smuggling into the E.U.“The Commission wants above all to get compensation for the financial losses and to get a court ruling to prevent future smuggling,” E.U. Commissioner Michaele Schreyer said.According to the ZKA, the latest trend is in the counterfeiting of well-known cigarette brands. Such cigarettes are being produced in factories specially set up for the purpose in China. Last year their share of the contraband cigarettes which were seized came to more than ten per cent.As recently as January 17, seven containers which arrived by ship from China were found in Bremen to be carrying 40 million cigarettes. The contents had been declared as water boilers and the containers were to have been transported by lorry to Britain.
