Cigarette smuggling

The increase in the special consumption tax on tobacco products from January 1 will entail a 100-million-euro annual loss in state revenues, a report issued by the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE) warned on Monday.

Cigarette smuggling in Romania recorded a sharp monthly increase of 22.8 per cent in September, the biggest monthly increase in the last two years, according to a study by the market research company Novel Research, commissioned by Romanian tobacco companies.

The black market share of the tobacco market thus rose to 18.3 per cent in September, up from 14.9 per cent in July.

The Interior Ministry reported a successful operation against cigarette smuggling in which it did not participate but provided information about the criminal group to partner institutions.

The Greek state missed out on total taxes of 2.535 billion euros over the previous seven years (from 2008 to 2014) due to cigarette smuggling, according to an annual European survey on illegal tobacco trading by KPMG.

Last year alone cigarette smuggling grew by 2.8 percentage points of the market to account for 20.6 percent of domestic tobacco transactions.

A member of Bulgaria's Special Unit for Combating Terrorism (SOBT) has been arrested at the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing which leads into Turkey.

The 72-hour detention is expected to be followed by a prosecutors' demand that he remain in custody, private national NOVA TV station reports.

The Plovdiv District Prosecutor's Office has charged five people, including two customs officers, a Border Police officer, a manager of a freight forwarding company and an employee of the company, with cigarette smuggling.

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.

The Romania-Republic of Moldova joint customs operations led to a decrease in the cigarette smuggling in north-eastern Romania, the Customs General Directorate (DGV) informed on Wednesday. A Novel Research study released on Tuesday had showed that the cigarette black market has been on a rising trend in July 2014, reaching the highest level in the last three years.