Illicit trade in cigarettes costs governments billions of euros each year due to lost tax and customs revenues. The volume of illicit trade in some places reaches 40-50% of the market. The average is 11.6% on a global scale. Smuggling provides access to low-priced cigarettes for young people and price-sensitive smokers who would not otherwise buy cigarettes.
Our project, “Contraband & Counterfeit Risk Identification (Business Process Analysis and Spatial Aspect),” will describe and analyze activity on trafficking routes through countries from Turkey to Western Europe, focusing on the impact to countries like France, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy—all of which suffer major losses from illicit trade in cigarettes—and paying particular attention to Bulgaria, since it is situated on the Balkan route and could become a key factor in reducing the level of illicit trade.
In order to raise awareness about the problem of illicit trade in cigarettes, and to clarify its links to other crimes, the project will do three things:
• Determine the methods of operation (modus operandi) and the territorial and timing aspects of the illicit tobacco trade and related crimes,
•Identify gaps and deficiencies in European and National legal frameworks, and
• Suggest improvements in methods of combating illicit trade in cigarettes.
So, the project sheds light on the illicit tobacco trade and its relations to other crimes, particularly by examining key factors and processes involved in this trade. The project also reveals the impact of these activities on the socio-economic environments of the studied regions, and it provides solid ground for improving the fight against tobacco trafficking and related crimes. Among other methods, the project uses a Risk Identification methodology to focus on counteracting contraband and counterfeits in the most vulnerable places, thus indicating where interdiction and enforcement activities might be most effectively concentrated.
The project team includes 20 specialists from many areas: Project and Risk management, Business Process Analysis, GIS, Spatio-temporal Analysis and Clustering, as well as Legal and Communication experts. The project leader, Professor Dimitar Dimitrov, PhD, is the Dean of Economics of Infrastructure at the UNWE and heads the Department of National and Regional Security. He has experience in 50 research projects, including 16 international projects, and is a member of the SIPRI military expenditure and arms production network and of the International Nuclear Security Education Network (INSEN), a unit of the IAEA. Professor Dimitrov has more than 100 publications in economics and security, some of them published in the Netherlands, Germany, USA, and UK.
This is a two-year project, wrapping up in the summer of 2019. The project is funded by PMI IMPACT, a global grant initiative from Philip Morris International that supports the fight against illicit tobacco trade and related crimes. Selection for funding was made by a council of independent experts in the fields of law, anti-corruption, and the fight against organized crime and illicit trade. This council reviewed and selected projects from more than 200 applications submitted by private and public organizations from over 40 countries.
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