The super dirty world of Tobacco.
Pleasure Reading!
http://www.icij.org/project/tobacco-underground
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Some extracts below:-
"The illicit trade is fueling addiction, say health experts, by making inexpensive cigarettes widely available, while robbing governments of sorely needed tax revenue. At the same time, officials warn, the booming black markets are fueling not only some terrorist groups but dozens of organized crime gangs, who find the big profits and low risk hard to resist."
"The backbone of this underground commerce — the acquisition of the cigarettes themselves — is by far the easiest part of the entire operation. The world’s four leading multinational tobacco companies, Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco International (JTI), Imperial Tobacco, and British American Tobacco (BAT), have produced billions of excess cigarettes in Ukraine, fueling a teeming black market that reaches across the European Union. Today, Ukraine is rivaled only by Russia as the top source of non-counterfeit brand cigarettes smuggled to Europe, EU officials say."
"The numbers tell the story. Each year, Ukraine’s cigarette consumption and legal exports top 100 billion sticks, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Health. Yet in 2008, tobacco companies manufactured and imported nearly 130 billion cigarettes — 30 percent in excess of what the local market can consume."
“Tobacco companies are benefiting from selling to smugglers,” says Kostyantyn Krasovsky, head of the tobacco control unit of the Institute of Strategic Research at Ukraine’s Ministry of Health. “They sell it to them at the same prices they sell to legal wholesalers.” Krasovsky adds that in dealing with smugglers, tobacco companies can potentially gain extra profits when a batch is confiscated by customs and destroyed. “It’s even better for them; another smuggler will come and buy the same quantity.”