A consignment of smuggled cigarettes, brought in from Turkmenistan bypassing the customs control zone, was uncovered by officers of the Agency for Financial Monitoring (AFM) in the Mangystau Region.
According to the agency's press service, the detained vehicle's load contained cigarettes instead of the goods declared on the waybills.
"The customs value of the seized 6.5 million packs of cigarettes amounted to almost 1.5 billion tenge <...> Currently, a pre-trial investigation has been launched into the fact of economic smuggling," the statement said.
Recall that in May it was reported that due to cigarette smuggling last year, the state budget of Kazakhstan lost approximately 33 billion tenge.
In August last year in Uralsk, a large batch of cigarettes with fake accounting and control marks (ACM) totalling more than 1.6 million packs was seized. It was valued at 967.5 million tenge.
At the same time, it became known that the AFM department for the Zhambyl Region was investigating a criminal case concerning an attempt to import two railway cars of tobacco products worth over 1.3 billion tenge without ACM and shipping documents from the Kyrgyz Republic.