Police discover cigarette smuggling scheme

29.07.2008 06:52
968
2 minute(s)

The police have found 50,000 packets of contraband cigarettes worth about half a million lei in a Chisinau depot, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to police officers, a group of six persons, including a citizen of Mauritania and a Turkish man, were caught in the act of loading 50,000 packs of cigarettes of different brands onto a truck near a depot located on Muncesti Street in Chisinau on July 24. The cigarettes have been smuggled into Moldova via Transnistria, bypassing the customs posts. From Chisinau, the cigarettes were to be transported to Europe. The transactions are assessed at about 3 million lei. Marcel Tabarcea, the deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s Frauds Investigation Division, said that three police officers were involved in the smuggling of cigarettes. Two of them had been earlier dismissed over participation in different fraudulent schemes for smuggling goods from Transnistria. Afterward, they had been reinstated in the posts. At the place of those involved in smuggling, the police found cigarettes worth about 230,000 lei, over eight tonnes of kernel worth half a million lei that were to be smuggled abroad, armament and munitions, laptops, processors, bank cards, bookkeeping records, stamps and different foreign currency worth about 10,000 euros. Under the legislation, the persons found guilty of smuggling are liable to three up to seven years in jail.