A multimillion-dollar black-market cigarette operation in St. Petersburg has been shut down, the city's anti-organized crime department has announced.
Police from St. Petersburg's regional anti-organized crime department, or RUBOP, descended Wednesday on the rented-out facilities of the Kirov plant in the city's southwest, seizing 1.32 million packets of counterfeit cigarettes, said Igor Odushko of RUBOP's press service.
The authorities also arrested the operation's managers, along with the owners of all the businesses responsible for renting the facility from the Kirov plant.
The sophisticated operation used equipment worth some $7 million, and officials said about $800,000 worth of raw materials were found at the plant.
Odushko said police found domestic and foreign brand names among the counterfeit smokes, including the U.S. brands Marlboro, Bond Street and L&M; Bulgaria's BT, Rodopi, Styuardessa and Inter; and Russia's Kosmos, Troika, Baltika, Kombat and Vertikal.
All of the cigarettes were stuffed with one and the same low-quality tobacco. "Even the American brands were filled with tobacco like that in Belomorkanal [generally considered one of the cheapest cigarettes on the Russian market]," Odushko said.
Although the operation's equipment value is a drop in the bucket when compared to Marlboro's $300 million investment into its Leningrad-region Izhora plant, the U.S. cigarette company's owners expressed satisfaction at this rare demonstration of police effectiveness.
"We are happy the government has toughened its control over illegal tobacco production," said Pyotr Lidov, director of media relations at Philip Morris' head office in Moscow.
Philip Morris brands have long been a favorite among counterfeiters. In 1998, police shut down the Kamelot factory, which had been making fake Philip Morris cigarettes in Taldom, north of Moscow. Police later closed down a similar production facility in Dedovsk, also on the outskirts of the capital.
Odushko said RUBOP believes a portion of the Kirov operation's output was produced legally on orders from several brand names.
However, representatives from Philip Morris, which owns Marlboro, Bond Street and L&M, said they have no side orders for the company's products.
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