Heavily armed criminal gangs are plundering the lucrative tobacco industry, carrying out at least four hijackings a day on vehicles transporting cigarettes.<\/p>\n
“You ‘hit’ a vehicle transporting cigarettes and you strike gold,” said Francois van der Merwe, CEO of the Tobacco Institute of Southern Africa.<\/p>\n
The tobacco institute claims that at least 6billion cigarettes consumed annually are either illegal (stolen and counterfeit) or illicit (undeclared or incorrectly packaged by the manufacturer to avoid paying tax).<\/p>\n
Of the 6 billion illicit cigarettes sold annually, 3 billion were manufactured in the country.<\/p>\n
He was commenting after Tabby Tsengiwe, the spokesman for British American Tobacco – one of the biggest distributors of cigarettes in South Africa – said yesterday that 1412 of its transport vehicles were hijacked annually.<\/p>\n
This equates to about four attacks a day. In January, armed robbers attacked a BAT vehicle in Brackenhurst, south of Johannesburg. On the same day, a truck delivering cigarettes was robbed by seven men armed with R5 assault rifles in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg.<\/p>\n
In April, police arrested five men in King William’s Town, Eastern Cape, after they robbed a truck of cigarettes worth R180.000.<\/p>\n
And according to a police report to the Gauteng portfolio committee on community safety in November last year, 20.5% of hijackings in the province involved BAT vehicles transporting cigarettes.<\/p>\n
Criminologists, researchers and the cigarette industry say sophisticated and organised syndicates are reportedly moving away from cash-in-transit vehicles, ATMs and banks to softer targets such as un-armoured and unescorted vehicles distributing cigarettes across South Africa.<\/p>\n
With the cigarette war escalating, criminologists are urging the government to do more to combat the crime.<\/p>\n
The company said hijackers prized products that could be rapidly dispersed, which made trucks transporting fast-moving consumer goods vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Van der Merwe said BAT was hardest hit by crime because of its huge distribution network system.<\/p>\n
“The traditional way of delivery is through wholesalers.”<\/p>\n
Because vehicles carry as many as 50 “master cases”, which contain about 10,000 cigarettes, a single attack could result in a syndicate “striking gold”.<\/p>\n
With a single cigarette costing R3 on the street, they could make R30,000 from one hit.<\/p>\n
“This is done mainly through excise manipulation, where not all produce is declared to SARS. Since 2010 South Africa has lost more than R22-billon because of illicit cigarettes,” he said.<\/p>\n
Source: timeslive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Heavily armed criminal gangs are plundering the lucrative tobacco industry, carrying out at least four hijackings a day on vehicles transporting cigarettes. “You ‘hit’ a vehicle transporting cigarettes and you strike gold,” said Francois van der Merwe, CEO of the Tobacco Institute of Southern Africa. The tobacco institute claims that at least 6billion cigarettes consumed … Continue reading “Crime smokes lucrative tobacco market”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":19288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[11873,2243,34,11875,1766,8321,11874],"class_list":["post-19286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-bat","tag-cigarettes","tag-crime","tag-heists","tag-hijacking","tag-revenue","tag-tabacco"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/cigarettes2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19287,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19286\/revisions\/19287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}