Cigarette smuggling worth 20 million rubles was stopped at Pskov customs

In the Pskov region, an attempt to smuggle cigarettes worth 20 million rubles was stopped on the Russian-Latvian border. Employees of the MAPP Burachki post found bags of tobacco products instead of expanded clay, which were transported in the cargo compartment of the car.

According to the documents, the truck was traveling from Kazakhstan to Poland and was carrying 11 tons of expanded clay. The transportation was carried out by a company registered in Lithuania.

The customs officers examined the car with the help of an inspection complex. It turned out that instead of expanded clay, there were about 130 packs of Belarusian cigarettes of various brands in paper bags. Their total cost was 19.8 million rubles.

A criminal case has been opened into the incident under the article "Large-scale smuggling of strategically important goods and resources," the Pskov News Feed writes, citing Andrei Goryachenka, deputy head of Pskov customs.

In early May, it was reported that the Nevelsky District Court of the Pskov region had sentenced an entrepreneur and a freight forwarder driver for cigarette smuggling in the amount of 39.9 million rubles. The court found both the driver and the businessman guilty under the articles "Smuggling" and "Storage, transportation for the sale of unmarked tobacco products by an organized group on an especially large scale." Both were sentenced to nine years and six months in prison to be served in a high-security penal colony and fined 1.5 million rubles.