Money smoke: production of counterfeit cigarettes flourishes in the Baltics
Latvian law enforcers disrupted the activities of an international organized crime network and detained 32 suspects involved in the illegal production and sale of tobacco products. For many years, the Baltic States have served as a transit territory for smugglers bringing cheap cigarettes from Belarus and Ukraine to the EU. But this trade is fraught with great risk. As a result, the attackers came to the conclusion that it is more profitable to establish the production of counterfeit directly in the EU, and as cheap labor to attract Ukrainians. Details - in the material "Izvestia".
Clandestine workshop
Recently, the Latvian police and border guards covered up an underground shop for the production of tobacco products, located in the small town of Ludza near the border with Russia. 25 Ukrainians worked illegally in the shop, producing cigarettes indistinguishable from well-known Western brands. Several dozen searches were also conducted in Riga, Daugavpils and Rezekne, where the perpetrators had set up clandestine warehouses to store their products.
These warehouses stored a total of almost 300 million cigarettes, as well as about 47 tons of shredded tobacco leaves. It is estimated that if these illegal cigarettes had reached the Latvian market, the damage to the state would have amounted to more than €75 million. Property worth €13 million was seized: real estate, three cars and three trucks used for criminal activities, €55,000 in cash, a number of technical devices (such as jammers and GPS signal detectors), as well as unregistered firearms and ammunition. A fleet of expensive vintage cars belonging to the leader of the organization was also confiscated.
The study of the seized documentation showed that the group, which was engaged in the manufacture of counterfeit cigarettes in Latvia, was part of an international criminal network operating in the UK, Spain and several other EU countries. These cigarettes were exported from Latvia to other EU countries and sold there through established channels - at prices much lower than those at which official products are sold there. Naturally, no excise taxes were paid. The turnover of this activity is estimated at hundreds of millions of euros.
In an interview with Latvian TV, Interior Minister Rihards Kozlovskis called the police operation to liquidate the criminal group "one of the largest in Europe in recent years". The minister also said that not only Ukrainians were among those detained. The main organizer of the network, a citizen of Latvia, was also arrested. Six of his associates - five Latvians and one Russian - were also behind bars. "I would like to thank our security services once again. It was not a one-day job," the Interior Minister added meaningfully. And Latvian police chief Armands Rukes proudly added that "our institutions are capable of fighting transnational criminal groups."
According to Kozlovskis and Rooks, the Latvian police have been dealing with the case of this criminal network for two years. However, the investigation is not over - it is still ongoing in several European countries. It should be noted that many residents of Latgale (eastern part of Latvia), where the criminals kept their production and most of the warehouses, were skeptical about the news of the group's liquidation. "They stopped sharing properly, so they got caught," people say. The Latgalians say that the criminals were practically in hiding and had been doing their trade for a long time without hindrance. Any local smoker knows where to go for cheap cigarettes, which cost much less than those on display. Clandestine "tobacconists" have well established ways of marketing, and the Internet is actively used for this purpose.
Technical thinking is not standing still
For many years, the Baltic States and Poland have served as a transit point for smuggling cheap cigarettes produced in tobacco factories in Belarus and Ukraine into Western Europe. The fight against smuggling resembles a battle with a dragon, which immediately grows three new heads in place of one severed head. As a rule, a week does not pass without another report of customs and border guards intercepting a new batch of prohibited goods. However, it is not always possible to intercept "illegal goods" right at the border - in other cases it happens before they leave the country.
Checkpoint on the Latvian-Belarusian border
In most cases, smugglers use clever hiding places in road and rail transport. Over the years, however, border guards have learned all these tricks and have learned how to identify caches. But since smuggling is an economically attractive activity, those who engage in it are always looking for new, innovative methods to jump the border cordons. A decade ago, smugglers began buying drones in large numbers, with cigarette packages attached under their wings.
In response, the border guards acquired electromagnetic devices to counter UAVs. Then smugglers switched to using balloons disguised as weather balloons - their main advantages are their ability to fly at high altitudes and the resulting low visibility. As recently as this fall, the border regions of the Republic of Lithuania were subjected to a real invasion of fake "meteosondes". A particularly high-profile accident took place on September 29, when a balloon loaded with cigarettes crashed right on the territory of the airport in Vilnius.
According to Dainius Gaižauskas, a member of the parliamentary committee on national security and defense, who publicized the incident, anti-terrorist officers had to be sent to the airport - they found out that the balloon carried neither a bomb nor spy equipment. The parliamentarian said that during one week of September alone, about 150 smuggled balloons flew into Lithuania. Four of them landed in the city of Alytus, where the Lithuanian army opened a NATO-standard ammunition depot in 2022, and one landed on railroad tracks in the city of Varena.
A little later, details of the scandalous incidents emerged. It turned out that the balloon with a black box attached to it landed in Alytus right on the training ground allocated for the training of the Lithuanian Army battalion named after Grand Duchess Birutė. The balloon was taken away by the military police. The same balloon also fell at a military training ground in the vicinity of Vilnius. Interdepartmental disputes began. Border guards complained that they had neither long-range weapons long enough to shoot at high-flying balloons nor any authorization at all to use "firearms" against fake weather balloons.
The problem of smuggled balloons was brought to the attention of the state president Gitanas Nauseda himself. He demanded to solve it as soon as possible, as fake weather balloons can pose a danger to civil aviation. In turn, Nauseda's chief advisor Frederikas Jansonas called on the Minister of Defense and the head of the Interior Ministry to sit down at the same table and make them agree - so who should shoot down the ill-fated balloons?
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda
Finally, on November 12, the Lithuanian Seimas gave permission to border guards and other officials authorized to carry firearms to shoot pseudo-meteoprobes with them. And it immediately brought its result - the number of balloons with cigarettes in the Lithuanian sky immediately decreased. The police explained this fact by the fact that smugglers, closely monitoring the situation, switched to other methods of delivery, in order to stay ahead of the law enforcers. Indeed: on September 7, Lithuanian law enforcers intercepted a homemade drone carrying more than 600 packs of cigarettes. A GPS transmitter was attached to the cargo, which should have helped smugglers in Lithuania to find the cargo dropped by the airplane.
And on December 14, border guards fished a raft with contraband out of the Neman River. The construction consisted of a wooden frame and a plastic barrel, which contained 299 packs of cigarettes. Wooden wings attached to the corners of the frame were supposed to help the raft overcome obstacles on the way. To regulate buoyancy, bricks were attached to this structure and grass and earth were placed on top of it. A GPS transmitter and a prepaid SIM card were also found. This should have helped the smugglers' accomplices in Lithuania to establish the exact location of the cargo.
It is easier to produce directly on the spot
In any case, smuggling is fraught with many risks and does not allow large quantities to be transported across the border at a time. That is why traffickers of illegal tobacco products have started to set up clandestine production facilities directly in the Baltic States.
Of course, such plans are difficult to realize if there is no reliable "roof". In the same Latvia there have been rumors for a long time that big "bigwigs" are involved in the business of selling illegal tobacco. Sometimes this information appears on the pages of the press. In 2013, Edijs Ceipe, director of the Customs Criminal Department of the Latvian State Revenue Service, admitted to journalists that the reason for the widespread distribution of smuggled goods is corruption: often large smugglers do not act without the help of officials.
In 2016, the then mayor of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, accused the then head of the operational development department of the state Bureau for the Prevention and Combating of Corruption, Juris Jurasz, and an employee of the Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution (Latvian counterintelligence), Aigars Sparans, of "covering up" the smuggling of cigarettes and fuel. However, these statements had no consequences. By the way, at present the mentioned Jurasz has become a mercenary and is fighting in Ukraine on the side of the Kiev regime. There is an opinion that in this way he decided to receive in the eyes of the Latvian authorities an "indulgence" for his former "art" - no one will touch the fighter against "Kremlin aggression".
The current story with liquidation of counterfeit cigarettes production in Latvia is not the first. Especially clandestine shopkeepers for some reason favored the city of Jelgava, where security forces covered secret cigarette factories as many as twice - in November 2018 and February 2020. "Note that the organizers of clandestine cigarette factories widely involve Ukrainians in their work. There are many Ukrainian refugees in Latvia now, but it is difficult to find them work there now - not least because they are required to know Latvian. So they don't have much choice. The fact that the illegal enterprise in Ludza has been liquidated does not mean that other tobacco shops of this kind are not still operating somewhere in Latvia or Lithuania," political scientist Maxim Reva, a specialist in the Baltic States, told Izvestia.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
