Revenue moves to stamp out multi-million euro cigarette smuggling

NEW security measures have been put in place to combat increasingly sophisticated criminal gangs involved in cigarette smuggling.

The Revenue introduced a new Irish tax stamp for cigarettes last April after expert fake stamps were detected in major consignments of smuggled cigarettes last year.

“A new development in 2005 was the detection of bogus Irish tax stamps affixed to packets of cigarettes in two separate consignments,” said a Revenue spokesman yesterday. “The tax stamps in question were expertly reproduced,” he said.

The fake stamps were found on a seizure of 4.8 million cigarettes, smuggled from the Ukraine, in Drogheda in March 2005 and a haul of 1.8m cigarettes, smuggled from China, in Limerick last July.

Customs experts believe criminals had taken a legitimate stamp and reproduced it using specialist expertise and equipment.

Each of the 6.6m cigarettes seized had a stamp on it, indicating mass production and assembly facilities. Revenue Commissioner Josephine Feehily said they acted quickly when they uncovered the false stamps. “A security feature is completely weakened once counterfeit stamps, good quality ones, become known. We moved straight away to shore it up with completely new stamps with a range of security measures.”

She said there were three security measures, with “very clever devices”, that could only be read by Customs officers.

The Customs Service declined to give further information for security reasons.

Ms Feehily said there could be no guarantee the new stamp might not itself be copied at some stage.

“You can never say never with counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is such a sophisticated business,” she said.

Customs use intelligence about shipments and risk-profiling of certain routes in order to limit smuggling into the country.

The business is a multi-million euro racket, dominated by organised criminals and paramilitary organisations, or members of them, with contacts in countries like China, Ukraine, Spain and Lithuania.

The 51 million cigarettes seized in 2005 are valued at over €15.50 million, with a potential loss of revenue to the State amounting to €12.5m. While the total quantity seized has dropped in recent years, the number of seizures has dramatically increased, by about 250% since 2002.

Most of this rise is put down to the emergence of intense smuggling from the Baltic states into Ireland, organised by Baltic criminal gangs.

In parallel with the rise in the number of seizures, Customs have increased the number of prosecutions, trebling from 54 in 2004 to 151 in 2005.

While Customs secured 102 convictions last year, the average fine handed out by the courts was less than €400.