Tobacco: the most smuggled legal substance in the world.
In early May, in Kaliningrad, one of the largest ports on the Baltic Sea, Russian border police shot down a low-flying drone with a 12-foot wingspan that was piloted by a GPS-guided computer. But this was no hightech spy craft, nor did the Federal Security Service thwart a terrorist attack: the drone was simply ferrying contraband cigarettes across the border with Lithuania.
The makeshift model aircraft was worth just a few hundred roubles, a mere pittance, but perfectly capable of carrying a payload of 500 packets of cigarettes taped to its fuselage. Total profit: $1,300 (€1,000) per ‘mission’. It is estimated that approximately one-third of the cigarettes smoked in Lithuania are illegally imported, a market worth €87 million.
The problem is global. In January, Turkey began to erect a 12-foot-tall wall along its 900- kilometre (660-mile) border with Syria, in part to stem the phenomenon, which has recently reached new heights. Since 2010, when the government hiked the tax on tobacco by 30%, the number of cigarettes sold on the black market has quadrupled, from 3.9 billion to 16.2 billion in 2013, with a loss of tax revenue for state coffers estimated at around $9.5 billion (€7bn).
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In early May, in Kaliningrad, one of the largest ports on the Baltic Sea, Russian border police shot down a low-flying drone with a 12-foot wingspan that was piloted by a GPS-guided computer. But this was no hightech spy craft, nor did the Federal Security Service thwart a terrorist attack: the drone was simply ferrying contraband cigarettes across the border with Lithuania.
The makeshift model aircraft was worth just a few hundred roubles, a mere pittance, but perfectly capable of carrying a payload of 500 packets of cigarettes taped to its fuselage. Total profit: $1,300 (€1,000) per ‘mission’. It is estimated that approximately one-third of the cigarettes smoked in Lithuania are illegally imported, a market worth €87 million.
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