Brussels, 24/08/2009 (Agence Europe) - On 18 August, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) announced that one of the players in a major international cigarette smuggling investigation had pleaded guilty in the United States courts in Miami for his part in defrauding European taxpayers of several million euro in taxes and customs duties. The defendant had conspired with individuals residing in Miami and in Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany to smuggle cigarettes from the port into Aachen in Germany, Dublin in Ireland and Felixstowe in the UK.
OLAF Director General Franz-Hermann Brüner noted that acting US Attorney Jeffrey H. Sloman had explicitly singled out OLAF for its outstanding contribution to the investigation. Brüner hailed the excellent cooperation between OLAF, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Department of Justice. He noted, too, the cooperation of the authorities in the member states targeted by the fraud, particularly Ireland, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom.
On Friday 14 August, the defendant entered a plea of guilty to all charges of the indictment. He admitted conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud in connection with the smuggling of cigarettes out of the US and into various European Union countries in order to avoid paying more than US$ 6.5 million (€4.6 million) in customs and tax duties. This guilty plea before a US court is a major milestone in a six-year investigation in which OLAF played a major part. The investigation spanned nine EU member states and several countries in Central and South America as well as the USA.
On 14 August, the acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and the Special Agent in Charge announced jointly in a press release that the individual who had pleaded guilty had bought hundreds of cases of cigarettes from Panama and had them transported to Miami. He then arranged for the purchase of other cargo, such as cotton, wood flooring and building insulation material to be used to cover the cigarettes. On four separate occasions between December 2001 and April 2008, he smuggled 2,702 cases, each containing 10,000 cigarettes, out of the port of Miami - a total of more than 27 million cigarettes. Only a few thousand dollars of customs duties and taxes were paid on each shipment, when the true amount that should have been paid was over $6.5 million. (L.C./transl.rt)