Batch of Counterfeit Cigarettes Worth $5 Million Destroyed in Ryazan

In Ryazan, a large batch of counterfeit cigarettes worth an estimated $5 million was destroyed. At the city’s industrial landfill, the cigarettes were dumped into a pit, driven over by bulldozers and graders, and the ditch was then backfilled.

Alexander Vorobyov, press secretary at the Head Directorate for Economic Crimes of the Federal Service for Economic and Tax Crimes of the RF Ministry of Internal Affairs, told journalists that the destroyed batch of counterfeit products was the largest in the past ten years.

It was ascertained that the cigarettes belonged to a group of criminals caught in early 2003 during a joint raid conducted by the Head Directorate for Economic Crimes of the Federal Service for Economic and Tax Crimes of the RF Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Directorate for Economic Crimes of the Ryazan Region Directorate of Internal Affairs.

The fake cigarettes were produced at the Shilovo Tobacco Factory, a municipal unitary enterprise. It was also determined that the criminals began producing counterfeit cigarettes under well-known trademarks at the factory in the summer of 2001, without the agreement of rights holders.

Sergei Kabashov, head of the Directorate for Economic Crimes of the Ryazan Region Directorate of Internal Affairs, said that the criminal group included 12 persons. The criminals arranged the illicit production of tobacco counterfeits, shipment, transportation, storage, sale and delivery of the fakes to criminal wholesale customers, raking in enormous profits in the process, Kabashov stated.

For transportation, the criminals under-loaded approximately the last five meters of truck trailers, reporting in shipping documents that the space was filled with hay or other cargos, reported RIA Novosti.

Investigators ascertained that counterfeit tobacco products were intended for illegal exports in large quantities. Thus, tobacco products made in the Ryazan region were transported via Moscow to Smolensk, Bryansk, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad where the fakes were transshipped and delivered through Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark and a number of other EU states.

According to police estimates, the destroyed cigarettes could have filled six railway cars, and a total of 4,500 boxes of counterfeit tobacco products were destroyed.