Customs officers at the Kulata border crossing found 3,950,000 cigarettes without excise stamps hidden among boxes of crisps in a Ukrainian truck. They stopped it on 19 October, the Customs Agency said. It is the third such truck found in the area in the past two weeks.
The tractor unit and semi-trailer have Ukrainian plates, and the driver is a Ukrainian citizen. The truck entered Bulgaria from Greece. Early information shows it was heading for Ukraine.
Officers from the Customs Intelligence and Investigation and X-ray Systems units of the Sofia Customs Directorate stopped it. The check is one of the compensating measures after Bulgaria joined the Schengen area. Officers first ran a risk analysis and read the transport papers, then put the truck through the X-ray scanner.
The image raised doubts, and officers searched the load in full at the Kulata customs office. The papers said the truck carried crisps. But besides the boxes of crisps, it held 11 pallets of cigarettes of two brands, with no excise stamps. At the prices used to value goods for court purposes, they are worth about €750,000.
The driver faces charges under Article 234, paragraph 3 of the Criminal Code, which covers holding large amounts of excise goods without stamps. The prosecutor's office in Blagoevgrad is overseeing the pre-trial proceedings.
The three trucks at Kulata carried 21.6m cigarettes in all. In the previous case, officers found nearly 9m cigarettes hidden in cornflakes. In the first, the cigarettes were stuffed into the metal casings of stoves.
The Customs Agency says that in just two weeks it has caught 5 large shipments with more than 27.5m illegal cigarettes, worth about €6m. They were stopped on the border with Greece, including at Kulata, and at the Lesovo checkpoint. At Lesovo, the cigarettes were hidden in metal and plastic goods, such as boxes for electrical panels and sink traps.
Customs experts say smugglers pick a cover cargo that keeps for a long time, is cheap and common, draws no attention and is not linked to particular routes. Another common trick is to hide cigarettes in equipment that is hard to unload.
Customs officers in Vidin recently found marijuana "plugged" with peanuts.