Customs seize truck carrying 2.1 million euros in illegal cigarettes

Lithuania’s Customs Criminal Service has seized a truck carrying about 412,000 packs of illegal cigarettes from Latvia, LRT reported. The cigarettes were valued at 2.1 million euros including taxes.

Customs officers from the Kaunas division spotted the DAF truck, which had Latvian registration plates, near Babtai at about noon on Friday, August 7. The Latvian driver had stopped at a bus stop.

The driver initially said he was transporting polystyrene for a Lithuanian company. However, the declared goods occupied only the rear of the trailer, while almost all of the remaining space was filled with boxes of Winston and Minsk Superslims cigarettes, according to the Customs Criminal Service.

Officials suspect the cigarettes were manufactured at a shadow factory that has been operating in Latvia for several years. A pretrial investigation into the illegal possession of excise goods has been opened by the Customs Criminal Service’s Kaunas division under the direction of prosecutors from the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor’s Office.

The truck driver was detained and later remanded in custody for two months by the Kaunas District Court.

This was the second truck from Latvia carrying cigarettes seized by customs criminal investigators in two weeks. On July 30, a vehicle carrying cigarettes worth 2.4 million euros was stopped near Kryžkalnis.

Since the start of this year, the Customs Criminal Service has seized about 2.6 million packs of illegal cigarettes, most of them brought in from Latvia. Their total value, including mandatory taxes, is estimated at about 13 million euros.