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And the smuggling seems to be growing rapidly. Colombian authorities seized 300,000 packs of Chinese cigarettes in 2016. But more than 6 million packs were confiscated within the first seven months of 2020 alone.
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In Brazil, seizures of Chinese cigarettes increased by almost 165 percent last year, according to data OCCRP obtained through a Freedom of Information request. There were 201,386 packs confiscated in 2020, up from 76,122 the previous year. In 2015, authorities seized only 2,007 packs.
In Venezuela, the consumption of illegal cigarettes has grown by 300 percent since 2019, according to a study by the BAT subsidiary Cigarrera Bigott. Illicit cigarettes comprise 30 percent of the entire market, costing the government $130 million in lost taxes annually. One CNTC brand, Golden Deer, accounts for 8 percent of the illegal market.
Last year, Colombian authorities busted a beat-up boat off its Caribbean coast carrying more than 1.7 million packs of Chinese cigarettes. The ship had sailed from Panama, but carried no paperwork showing the tobacco could legally enter Colombia.
Shipments are cloaked in paperwork, giving the connected companies plausible deniability of smuggling. Yet evidence collected by journalists shows that the companies are shipping vast amounts of cigarettes to countries with no legal market for them. And the companies have done business with smugglers operating in Colombia and the U.S.
Reporters found four firms operating in Panama with connections to CNTC, although the sheer volume of Chinese cigarettes being smuggled around Latin America suggests that similar networks remain undiscovered. The four Panama-registered companies were contacted for comment but none responded.
Finta had sold the company more than 599 metric tons of cigarettes, sent from Colón to Houston in 44 separate shipments. Victor M. Guerra Inc also received cigarette shipments directly from Overseas United, as well as another Finta-connected firm called Take Roll.
Meanwhile, export records show that Panama-registered Kinea and Take Roll both sent Chinese cigarettes out of the Colón Free Trade Zone to a number of Latin American countries, including Peru and Colombia. Kinea shipped to Bolivia, as well as to a customer based in Ciudad del Este, the second-largest city in neighboring Paraguay, and a well-known hub for smuggling contraband across the Tri-Border Area, a region that also includes Argentina and Brazil.
Juan Carlos Buitrago said that when he was director of the Colombian Tax and Customs Police from 2018 to 2020, tobacco companies urged him to work with Chinese authorities to stem the flow of illegal CNTC cigarettes into the country.
A shopkeeper in San Andresitos, an area in the city center known for black market goods, offered boxes containing 2,000 cigarettes for less than $300. The cigarettes were kept in a nearby warehouse, he said. Three other shopkeepers also offered to sell a journalist Chinese cigarettes.
If China Tobacco has its way, those cigarettes may soon be marketed legally in Mexico. At least five of the Chinese companies that make up CNTC have applied to the government for permission to sell their products in the country.
Because of financial pressures experienced by participants, the high price of Canadian cigarettes posed a significant challenge to their continued smoking. While some immigrants bought fully-taxed cigarettes from licensed retailers, more often they sought low-cost cigarettes from a variety of sources. The two most important sources were cigarettes imported during travels to China and online purchases of Chinese cigarettes. The cigarettes obtained through online transactions were imported by smoking or non-smoking Chinese immigrants and visitors, suggesting the Chinese community were involved or complicit in sustaining this form of purchasing behavior. Other less common sources included Canada-USA cross border purchasing, roll your-own pouch tobacco, and buying cigarettes available on First Nations reserves.
Chinese Canadian immigrant men used various means to obtain cheap cigarettes. Future research studies could explore more detailed features of access to expose gaps in policy and improve tobacco regulatory frameworks.
From 2006 to 2015, 290,912 new permanent residents from China landed in Canada, and the Chinese comprise the second largest foreign-born group in Canada [27]. It is important to explore how cigarettes are accessed to inform tobacco control policy and the development of interventions to reduce smoking among Chinese immigrants.
All participants, both current smokers and ex-smokers, talked about the high price of cigarettes in Canada and in relation to their financial situation. They complained that the cigarettes in Canada were much more expensive than those in China. Unlike China, where a wide price range in cigarettes facilitates smoking for individuals from different economic conditions, Canadian cigarettes were universally expensive with no discounted or cheaper brands. Several participants mentioned going to licensed retailers, such as gas stations, supermarkets, or convenient stores, to buy full-taxed cigarettes, but more often they sought cheaper sources to afford their smoking (Table 2). The following section details the avenues participants found to purchase cheap cigarettes.
The participants said they used the Internet to find online sources for Chinese cigarettes. With dozens of Chinese websites available in Canada, the participants never found difficulty in seeking out online sellers. Online sales were offered by both smokers and non-smokers and presented significant savings for regular smokers. A participant who had quit smoking one and half years ago said:
Chinese cigarettes are much cheaper than Canadian cigarettes. I can tell you if Caucasians are able to buy cigarettes from China, they would buy them too. It is a competition. One pack of cigarette in Canada costs 8 or 9 dollars but it only costs 3 or 4 dollars for the same brand in China; it is almost half price. If you do the calculation, how much money can you save in a year if you save 30 dollars every month? (CS8)
I live in Surrey and it takes me only 20 min to drive to the Costco in the US. All the goods in the US supermarkets are cheaper than those in Canada. Once I run out of cigarettes I go there to buy. In daily life I spend USD not CAD [Canadian dollar]. I feel myself semi-American, perhaps more American than Canadian.[laughed] (CS22)
This is the first study to explore how Chinese Canadian immigrant men who smoke access cigarettes. It provides valuable knowledge about the ways in which Chinese immigrants circumvent fully taxed cigarettes in Canada to continue their smoking.
Still, this demand for low-priced cigarettes will continue to fuel the presence of Chinese manufactured fake cigarettes available for online purchase. Other researchers have argued that the purchase of cheap online cigarettes is more likely to be used by people of higher SES, because it requires specific equipment and skills [9, 34]. However, as computers, including mobiles and wi-fi internet access is quickly becoming a norm of daily life for people from all backgrounds, online transactions in cigarettes will likely continue to grow.
As with all qualitative research, caution is needed in generalizing the findings from this study to Chinese immigrants who smoke, not only because of the small number of the participants, but also because of the participants being a group of expectant fathers or fathers of young children. Also, the reliance on telephone interviews might have resulted in participants omitting information or communicating in ways that did not reflect the actual situation. For example, some participants might have perceived unconventional access to cigarettes as illegal and may have concealed their actual experiences.
As international efforts have attempted to curb illegal trade in tobacco, our study sheds light on how individuals legally obtain cheap cigarettes across borders and therefore sustain smoking prevalence among the immigrants. The current measures have not done enough to control the cross-border flow of cigarettes when each and every person travelling can legally carry cigarettes. A complete ban on tobacco crossing borders may be necessary.
There are suggestions that tax increases should equally apply to factory-made and roll-your-own cigarettes [32]. While the First Nations people continue to offer tax-free sales of tobacco in their communities, there have been calls to implement taxation of tobacco sold to non-status Indians [8]. Increasing tobacco taxes in neighboring countries with lower cigarette prices has also been suggested. The European Union has urged to reduce price differences between the union countries, and to reduce the number of cigarettes or amount of loose leaf tobacco that a person can legally import for personal consumption [10]. However, the findings from our study suggest that imposing restrictions on the number of cigarettes that individuals can carry across borders is not likely to be sufficient to slow or stop the global movement of cigarettes. A complete ban on tobacco products across borders is necessary. However, it is not clear how countries could co-ordinate this effort and the extent to which it could stimulate the black market is unknown.
An 80-year-old Mission man and two young associates were convicted and sentenced for trying to move the stash. The elder player in the scheme admitted he intended to smuggle nearly 423 million cigarettes through Texas into Mexico.
Jose Francisco Guerra owned and operated Victor M. Guerra Inc. Duty Free Shop, a customs brokering company in Hidalgo. On Jan. 15, 2020, Department of Public Safety troopers stopped a tractor-trailer in Hidalgo County loaded with 17 million cigarettes headed for Mexico, according to court documents. The shipping manifest had been falsified to indicate the vehicle was carrying used clothes, toys and purses, and the cigarettes lacked the applicable tax stamp as Texas law requires. 041b061a72