Hong Kong Customs in a two-week special operation seized two cross-boundary vehicles for smuggling illicit cigarettes and smashed five storage points. About three million sticks of illicit cigarettes with total market value of $7.5 million and a duty potential of about $5.1 million were seized in the operation.
In the first 10 months of this year, the Customs detected 22 significant smuggling cases with an average of over 1.6 million sticks of illicit cigarettes in each case.
During the period, a total of about 36 million sticks of illicit cigarettes were seized, more than the total number of cases and seizures in 2012 (17 cases and 27 million sticks of illicit cigarettes respectively).
