Cigarette trafficking has exploded in recent months with the economic crisis. A clandestine tobacco workshop was thus dismantled in Forbach (Moselle), where more than three tonnes of tobacco were seized and a man was arrested, the regional customs department of Nancy announced on Thursday.
The seizures took place on February 15 during the control of the “professional premises of an undeclared trade in alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages evading duties and tax”. In this business, “a workshop for the production and packaging of hookah tobacco” was also discovered, customs said in a statement.
A “shisha tobacco production complex” was also uncovered, according to the same source. According to her, the investigations entrusted to the judicial customs officers subsequently made it possible to discover on the site “nearly 1.748 tonnes of tobacco (…) and 1.39 tonnes of hookah tobacco”, i.e. a total of more than three tonnes. .
cigarette manufacturing factory
A forty-year-old, unknown to justice and “socially integrated”, was arrested, it was specified. The hookah tobacco came mainly “from smuggled imports from Turkey via Germany and the rest from illegal production carried out there”, according to customs.
Nearly 350 liters of alcohol, mainly beer, were also seized, it was added, adding that this was the first dismantling of a tobacco factory in eastern France, the fifth in France since the end of 2021.
“Since the beginning of the 2000s, the European Union has been confronted with the phenomenon of clandestine cigarette manufacturing factories”, factories which “have gradually established themselves throughout Europe until reaching France”, explain the customs in their press release, stating that the investigations were continuing with regard to the Forbach workshop.