The mainland’s Gongbei customs has announced that a lorry driver attempted to smuggle 576,000 cigarettes out of the mainland via the Zhuhai checkpoint of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) earlier this month.
The case, which occurred on May 17, was announced in a statement on Sunday, which did not mention whether the lorry was about to travel to Macau or Hong Kong.
Neither did the statement mention how much the contraband was worth. It merely said that the driver failed to have the required export licence for tobacco goods.
Mainland customs services operating at the HZMB Zhuhai checkpoint are run by Zhuhai’s Gongbei China Customs, which oversees the operations of the various customs checkpoints in Zhuhai City and Zhongshan City, such as those at the Hengqin checkpoint, Qingmao checkpoint and Zhongshan Port, alongside the Gongbei checkpoint and the HZMB Zhuhai checkpoint.
At 1 a.m. on May 17, the statement said, a cross-border lorry driver, who had declared carrying cross-border e-commerce goods, was about to leave the mainland via the HZMB Zhuhai checkpoint, when customs officers, upon risk analysis, detected anomalies in the goods carried by the lorry.
After a detailed examination of the goods, the statement said, the customs officers found 45 items that purported to be voltage control boxes for lighting devices but were actually specifically designed hollow containers packed with smuggled cigarettes.
According to the statement, the customs officers seized a total of 2,880 cartons of cigarettes, i.e., 28,800 packets containing 576,000 cigarettes in total, all of which were of the brand of Manchester*, the statement said.
The statement quoted Article 3 of the nation’s Tobacco Monopoly Law as stipulating that “the state shall, according to law, exercise monopoly administration over the manufacture, sale, import and export of tobacco monopoly commodities, and adopt a tobacco monopoly licensing system”, according to which, the statement noted, the export of cigarettes must obtain a licence from the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration.
*Manchester cigarettes are produced by a company based in Dubai. – Poe
This undated handout photo released by the Gongbei customs on Sunday shows the smuggled “Manchester” cigarettes seized from a lorry stopped at the HZMB Zhuhai checkpoint on May 17.
