Operation boomerang
The operation boomerang called a search and investigate operation of state authorities of the countries Greece , Belgium and Germany against a Europe-wide smuggling of cigarettes , which covered the period from 2006 by 2008. For the German customs it was the largest search operation in German criminal history regarding the number of confiscated cigarettes and the number of accused. The international coordination of the operation was carried out with the support of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).
The investigation begins
The investigations began in August 2006 when a lorry was observed during a customs inspection on federal motorway 2 in the Bielefeld area , which apparently wanted to avoid this inspection. As Wolfgang Schmitz, the spokesman for the Customs Criminal Police Office based in Cologne, explained that customs investigators followed the truck and came across an illegal cigarette warehouse. In this truck alone, which was driven by a driver of Ukrainian nationality, customs investigators discovered a million smuggled Marlboro and L&M cigarettes . The route of the truck could be traced back via the Czech Republic , Austria , Italy and the Balkan countries to Greece.
The observations based on this case led to further similar search results in the same reference area. As a result of these events, the public prosecutor's offices in Oldenburg and Braunschweig commissioned the customs authorities with further investigations, with the Central Customs Support Group at the Cologne Customs Criminal Police Office also taking action. The surveillance measures that have now been initiated by listening to telephone calls, tracking suspicious persons, observing discovered camps and using undercover agents revealed that the trucks carrying the illegal cigarette loads had their origin in the Athens area.
Furthermore, it was found that the suspected people had veiled conversations with code names and otherwise behaved in a conspiratorial manner. The handover and delivery of the smuggled cigarettes was always organized for the drivers in such a way that they were not directly involved in the action. The chief of the gang operated with ten different telephone connections to make it difficult to assign the calls to a person. The cigarettes were mostly hidden under a load of peppers .
Organization of smugglers
The bulk of the logistical handling of the smuggled goods was found in the Belgian cities of Ghent and Liège . More than twenty storage and transshipment sites have been discovered in Germany. There were at least 69 transports of 169 million illegal cigarettes via this German network alone. Like the head of customs investigations Jürgen Heise. The former customs commissioner in Bad Harzburg-Eckertal and organizer of the "Pig Bank" campaign, and his colleague Ulrik Schade from the Hanover customs investigation team, reported that the 16-person investigation group was able to uncover the personnel structure of the smuggling organization. Accordingly, there was a regionally structured distribution network. Prosecutor Ralf Tacke from the Braunschweig public prosecutor spoke of a hierarchy of the organization in this context. At the head was an elderly Greek who went by the code name Uncle Kostj . There was a regional organizer for each region of the distribution network, but he was not directly involved in carrying out the smuggling operation. In the Bielefeld area alone, three of these regional representatives have now been sentenced to prison terms by a court.
The core of the gang was made up of eight Greeks and German-Greeks. Members of this gang changed their stay between Greece and the other countries again and again, so that the investigators of the operation came up with the name boomerang according to this shuttle traffic . Four of the Greeks from the Athens area were arrested in June 2008 and have since been extradited to Germany. In the course of the investigation, six objects were identified and searched in the Athens area.
Results of the searches and investigations
By mid-2008, the gang succeeded in building up an illegal market for well-known counterfeit cigarette brands on a large scale in Germany. So she was able to introduce new brands like Memphis , Park , Medallon and Jin Ling on the cigarette market. This created an illegal market that expanded in competition with the legal market. More than one hundred storage and production sites for illegal cigarettes have been identified in several European countries. In the entire European wanted area, 638 115 440 untaxed and not cleared cigarettes could be seized. This prevented a tax loss of 108 479 620 euros across Europe. The realized market value of the confiscated cigarettes would have been around 150 million euros.
28 suspects were arrested by the gang, including 14 in Germany. A total of 79 suspects - including the transporters, suppliers, wholesalers and middlemen - were investigated in Germany. From December 4, 2008, court proceedings against eight suspects, the core of the gang, will be opened before the Oldenburg Regional Court.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Customs hit the cigarette mafia, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 28, 2008
- ↑ http://www.op-marburg.de/newsroom/regional/art185,744167 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated December 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Customs: Half a billion smuggled cigarettes confiscated. (No longer available online.) November 28, 2008, archived from the original on December 1, 2008 ; accessed on April 29, 2020 .
- ↑ http://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1227802976935.shtml ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Jörg Diehl: Strike against smugglers: Customs secure more than half a billion cigarettes. In: Spiegel Online . November 28, 2008, accessed June 10, 2018 .
- ↑ http://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1227802976935.shtml ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.nw-news.de/nw/news/owl_/_nrw/?cnt=2714237 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.oberpfalznetz.de/nachrichten/newsmlmmd_eb18cc803b775b52dfa7978d8f563a9b_d1_xml-106-Tafp-Sdeutschland,1,0.html ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
