Greece seeks to plug its 'Bermuda Triangle' of lost taxes

It could be a scene from a thriller: a ghost ship abandoned in the crystal-clear bay of a Greek island, its hold crammed with millions of illegal cigarettes, the crew nowhere to be seen.

And no one knows where the freighter Amaranthus or its cargo were bound for when it beached on the island of Zanthe off the Ionian coast of western Greece in December.

But such discoveries are now almost routine for police as cigarette and petrol smuggling has become big business in crisis-hit Greece.

Every country in Europe has a problem with cigarette smuggling but in Greece -- which has the highest proportion of smokers of any developed country -- it has mushroomed since the economy sank into crisis.

A security official, who asked not to be named, told AFP corruption and a lack of resources had caused "major failings in the Greek Customs system" with few major seizures or investigations into smuggling rings.

Yet it is by cracking down on this multi-billion euro business, and the even more lucrative trade in petrol smuggling, that the new left-wing government hopes to find some of the money it needs to pay off Greeces gigantic debts.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has made stamping out fuel and cigarette fraud one of his priority reforms, with the state losing an estimated 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) a year in petrol tax alone, and between 500 and 600 million euros in lost revenue on tobacco.

According to the market research company Nielsen, which used official Greek data, more than one cigarette in five smoked in Greece last year was smuggled, compared with only three percent in 2009 when the crisis that has devastated the Greek economy first struck.

But with the price of cigarettes rocketing, and...