Ukraine’s ‘Lost’ Cigarettes Flood Europe
The hang glider pilot insisted it was a routine flight, and that strong winds had blown him over the border from Hungary into Ukraine. But the man arrested by Ukrainian authorities last July, with his flight suit and night-vision gear, looked suspiciously like other hang-gliding smugglers along the border — smugglers who take off from Ukraine, fly into Hungary, and each drop as much as 100 cartons of contraband cigarettes.
Blame The Distributor - How Gallaher Stayed in the Smuggling Game
In 2004, Cyprus-based tobacco distributor Tlais Enterprises Limited (TEL) was told it had received a “red card” from British customs, a warning that the company was suspected of cigarette smuggling. TEL’s owner, Ptolomeos Tlais, was surprised. Born in Lebanon to a wealthy trading family, Tlais was doing, he said, exactly what his supplier, Gallaher Tobacco, had told him to do: quickly dumping large amounts of cigarettes onto developing countries. Everyone involved, he insists, knew that some of these smokes — especially their low-end Sovereign brand — would find their way back to the U.K., where avoidance of high tobacco taxes guaranteed smugglers a windfall.
On first approach, Yunxiao seems like any other Chinese backwater caught in uneasy industrial transition. Faded advertisements line the streets downtown, where motorcyclists wearing bamboo-frond hats determinedly vie for passengers in a riot of honking. A cheerful red banner in the city center exhorts citizens to develop the local economy — and yet the message seems ironic. After all, since the 1990s, Yunxiao has already sprouted its own league of millionaires, famous throughout China.
