The Border Guard Service Department of the KNB in the Aktobe region has prevented the illegal export of a large consignment of cigarettes from Kazakhstan through the «Zhaiysan» vehicle checkpoint.
According to the department's press service, more than 71,000 packs were being removed without accompanying documents, concealed under crates of vegetables.
Preliminary estimates put the value of the seized goods at around 50 million tenge. The detained cargo has been handed over to the relevant authority for further investigation.
It will be recalled that it was previously reported that Kazakhstan's state budget lost approximately 33 billion tenge last year due to cigarette smuggling.
In September of this year, border guards thwarted attempts to illegally import cigarettes at the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border. The tobacco products were found in a refrigerated container which, according to the accompanying documents, should have contained Bulgarian peppers. During the inspection, more than 180,000 packs of undeclared cigarettes of the brands «Oris», «Parlament» and «Zumerret» were seized.
Shortly before this, 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. The customs value of the confiscated 6.5 million packs of cigarettes amounted to nearly 1.5 billion tenge.
In August last year, a large consignment of cigarettes with counterfeit excise stamps (UCM) totalling more than 1.6 million packs was seized in Uralsk. It was valued at 967.5 million tenge.
At that time, it was also reported that the AFM department for the Zhambyl Region was investigating a criminal case concerning an attempt to import two railway wagons of tobacco products worth over 1.3 billion tenge without excise stamps and accompanying documents from the Kyrgyz Republic.