Toxic cigarettes: illegal amount from the East and China.

Il Campania Regional Command of the Guardia di Finanza continues in its important anti-smuggling operation of cigarettes imported from the East and especially from China. In the last raid alone, they seized a ton of cigarettes and reported 80 people.

Since January of the 2012 a total of 43 tons of cigarettes, 1338 people have been prosecuted and denounced and 80 has been arrested, 56 vehicles and 11 immovable property used for the transport and storage of goods have been seized.

Most of the smuggling takes place by sea in containers filled with packets of cigarettes mainly from China and Greece. The other part of the smuggling takes place overland with vehicles arriving from Ukraine, Poland and the Republic of Moldova.

It should certainly be noted that the phenomenon of local counterfeiting is also worrying: in the last two years 15 tons of counterfeit cigarettes have been seized in Campania.

smuggled cigarettes

The problems related to smuggling are essentially two. The first is the negative impact on tax revenues which recorded a total of taxes evaded equal to over 6 million euros. The interest in the incessant fight against smuggling is due to the fact that the capital linked to this poison is enormous, in fact the turnover of the multinationals that produce cigarettes is about 60 times higher than the budget of the World Health Organization and that the taxes on the tobacco account for a significant part of state revenues.

The second reason, certainly the most important, is that all these cigarettes are made of poor materials, with maps and filters of very poor quality and in some cases with tobacco containing highly toxic substances such as arsenic and carbon monoxide in amounts exceeding the norm.

 

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Written by Ugo Marseglia
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