Schmuggel and Schwarzmarkt: Austria loses 115 million euros in taxes!

Schmuggel and Schwarzmarkt: Austria loses 115 million euros in taxes!

Vienna, Österreich - In 2024, the market for illegal and fake cigarettes in Europe experienced an alarming increase. According to a report by KPMG for Philip Morris International, 52.2 billion cigarettes were consumed in Europe, which were illegal or un taxed, which is about 10 percent of the entire market. Austria was particularly affected, where 4 out of 100 cigarettes were illegal, which led to a tax loss of around 115 million euros, due to the smuggling of 520 million cigarettes, such as vienna.at.

The data also show that the situation in the entire European Union is serious. In 2024, the number of fake or untrained cigarettes with 38.9 billion reached a record high since 2015. Of which, 15.3 billion counterfeits were, which shows an increase in the proportion of fake cigarettes from 19-20 percent in 2019 to around 39 percent. The increasing market share of illegitimate cigarettes indicates the lucrative but risky business, in which organized crime plays an increasingly professional role by using online trade and illegal factories. In many cases, this production takes place under exploitative conditions, such as Kurier.at сообщает.

causes and effects

The main suppliers for illegal cigarettes are non-EU countries such as Albania, Belarus, Northern Macedonia and Turkey, from which a significant part of the confiscated goods come. In Austria, for example, there are 230 million illegal cigarettes to other countries, 90 million come from northern Macedonia, and 60 million are fake. The illegal cigarette market not only endangers consumers' health, but also undermines government income and legal regulations.

The European Commission, represented by the EU Commissioner Woepke Hoekstra, has increasingly campaigned for a reform of tobacco taxation in order to counteract this growing problem. According to the KPMG report, evidence-based regulation shows that the black market share in countries such as Ukraine and Greece could be significantly reduced by 5.72 and 6.21 percentage points.

measures against the cigarette smuggling

To combat the cigarette smuggling, the European Office for Fraud Control (OLAF) has coordinated significant measures. Together with national law enforcement agencies and international organizations such as Europol, Olaf has carried out numerous actions to arrest suspects and confiscation of illegal cigarettes since 2012. Particularly noteworthy are the communal missions, in which over 368 million cigarettes were recently secured in 2020, a lot of it came from the Far East and the Balkans. These operations have not only contributed to combating the illegal market, but also to uncovering networks that are involved in organized crime, as on anti-fraud.ec.europa.eu is found.

The worrying trends in illegal tobacco business illustrate the need for coordinated and effective measures at European level. It remains to be seen how successfully the new initiatives and regulatory changes will be to combat this flourishing but harmful market.