According to a report by the Baikal Daily News Agency on December 26th, customs officers at the Buryat customs in Russia discovered a hidden compartment filled with smuggled tobacco on a bus coming from Mongolia.
It has been reported that the driver attempted to smuggle over 1150 packages of tobacco into the country from Mongolia stealthily. The customs officials uncovered and seized the tobacco at the border inspection station. The driver had submitted relevant documents for the bus upon entering the station and declared that there were no items requiring declaration on board. However, through the inspection of the mobile scanning system, customs officials discovered the tobacco concealed within the ventilation system of the bus.
The offender admitted that he attempted to smuggle tobacco into Russia for the purpose of evading customs checks, driven by commercial interests. In order to accomplish this, he had pre-emptively dismantled the ventilation system on the overhead passenger seats and concealed 115 packages of tobacco within it.
Shortly afterwards, Vrezh Tatevosyan, the director of the customs station, explicitly stated that according to the customs law of the Eurasian Economic Union, each adult citizen is only allowed to bring a maximum of 200 packs of cigarettes, or 50 cigars, or 200 heated tobacco products (cigarettes), or 250 grams of tobacco into the member countries of the union.
