UN Radio

Customs cigarette seizure

By Birol Urcan

Hello and welcome to UNMIK On air

Customs anti smuggling unit recently confiscated 150.000 cigarettes.

Edon Xharra a customs officer was a part of this action, he explains that it was a successful one.

We just came back form an illegal cigarette confiscation action that we had in Graqanica.

We found quite big amount of cigarettes with no banderoles, as you can see these cigarettes are with Serbian banderoles, they don’t have Kosovo banderoles that’s why we had to confiscate them

I have to point out that cooperation with Kosovo police service on this action was very good; they helped us all the time”

UNMIK customs intensified their illegal cigarette confiscation action at the beginning of the 2004 shortly after the implementation of the banderole system.

According to the Customs Service before the banderoles, it was very difficult to confiscate smuggled cigarettes inside the Kosovar market;

As it was impossible to distinguish between smuggled cigarettes and legal ones.

Ekrem Hajdari deputy director at the UNMIK Customs explains

“But I can say that since the beginning of the year 2004 until today we were pretty successful on abolition of this occurrence.

In year 2004 we have confiscated around 8 and half milion cigarettes ,while for this year so far until month of September this number goes up to 10 million cigarettes “

In the past twenty months UNMIK Customs has confiscated 18 million illegal cigarettes.

Paul Acda the Director General of UNMIK Customs Service claims that in the future Customs will focus on three measures in an attempt to improve their actions in fighting cigarette smuggling.

Like: establishing better contacts and cooperation with the regional neighbors, enhance intelligent capabilities by developing further the cooperation with police and other people involved in law and enforcement and by decreasing leakage form duty free sources as KFOR or UNMIK PX .

“When you take those three measures together, there is one key element, which actually customs cannot deliver on.

Which is the people of Kosovo only smoking cigarettes that have a Kosovo banderole on and two if they have information about people who smuggling cigarettes, or people who are selling smuggled cigarettes then to tell us about it and we will take the appropriate action “

This was all for today, thank you for listening and have a good day