In the Lviv region, an indictment has been submitted to court against the organiser of an illicit operation producing tobacco products and counterfeit alcohol. The pre-trial investigation in this criminal proceeding was completed by detectives of the Territorial Department of the Economic Security Bureau in Lviv region.
According to the investigation, the suspect was not registered as a business entity and did not hold licences for the manufacture of tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. Nevertheless, he set up an underground workshop equipped to provide a full production cycle and large-scale output.
In this workshop, machines shredded tobacco leaves, filled cigarette tubes, packaged finished cigarette packs and wrapped them in shrink film. At the same time, the suspect bottled alcohol and affixed forged excise duty stamps to the bottles, which, according to the case file, he had bought from an unidentified individual. The finished products were labelled with the branding of well-known trademarks so that the counterfeit goods would appear to be legitimate products.
During searches of a non-residential premises in the Lviv region, officers seized 40,000 excise duty stamps showing signs of forgery, around 4,800 bottles of alcohol with fake stamps, machinery for shredding tobacco, filling tubes, packaging cigarettes and affixing labels. Dozens of sacks of shredded tobacco and boxes of leaf tobacco were also seized, along with cigarettes without excise stamps, hundreds of thousands of empty tubes, 36,000 caps, tens of thousands of labels of various trademarks, containers with liquid with a characteristic smell of alcohol, flavourings and packaging materials.
The indictment has been submitted to court under Part 1, Article 199 (storage and sale of forged excise duty stamps) and Part 2, Article 204 (illegal manufacture of excisable goods) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The procedural guidance in the case was provided by prosecutors of the Lviv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.