On the morning of this Thursday, June 27, The Fiscal and Customs Police, Polfa, reported the results of an operation against the smuggling of cigarettes and footwear.
The operation was coordinated with the Dian, the Prosecutor’s Office and the US Homeland Security Investigations Agency (HSI), who carried out the dismantling of a criminal structure that was operating in Nariño and Valle del Cauca.
Likewise, in another parallel activity, the Polfa uniformed officers managed to seize contraband merchandise in La Guajira and in the center of the city of Cali.
Along these lines, Polfa confirmed that 5 people dedicated to shoe smuggling in Cali (1) Pasto (4) were captured, who must answer to the authorities for the alleged crimes of conspiracy to commit a crime, aiding and abetting smuggling, bribery and usurpation of intellectual property rights.
The head of the criminal network coordinated the collection of bribes to facilitate the passage of smuggled footwear through the routes from the port of Cartagena to Ecuador, passing through Buenaventura, Cali, Pasto and Ipiales.
The cigarettes were located in a ranch
Photo:Tax and Customs Police, Polfa.
Contraband shoes worth more than 2 billion pesos
During the operations, several raids were carried out after which The seizure of 19,023 pairs of footwear of different brands was achieved, with
a commercial appraisal of $2,400,000,000.
Logically, since it was contraband merchandise, it entered the country without complying with the requirements demanded by current customs regulations, which is why it was seized and placed at the disposal of the Cali Customs section.
According to the Police, between 2022 and 2023, 27,791 pairs of footwear were seized, commercially valued at 3.6 million dollars. All the seized footwear has expert evidence confirming the falsity and commercial damage to world-renowned brands, and it was determined that a large amount of it was intended to reach Ecuador through Ipiales where, due to dollarization, it acquires a value of up to 300 percent higher.
This merchandise in its entirety comes from the Asian continent.
The cigarettes were seized by the Tax Police
Photo:Tax and Customs Police, Polfa.
In Cali, foreign merchandise was also seized on the Yumbo-Cali public highway, where a shipment of contraband cigarettes was discovered being transported in a truck-type vehicle from Bogotá to Ipiales (Nariño), a border area with Ecuador.
During the operation, two people were captured for the crime of favoring the
smuggling. In addition, a vehicle was seized and 502,500 packs of cigarettes of foreign origin, with a commercial value of $4,594,880,000.
At the same time, in a ranch in the rural sector that leads from the municipality of Maicao to Uribia, La Guajira, a search and seizure order was carried out where 30,000 cigarette packs were seized in a warehouse, without the documentation that would prove their legal entry into the national territory. These cigarettes were commercially valued at $50,000,000.
So far this year, 889,390 packs of cigarettes have been seized for a
value of $3,814,998,003 and the seizure of 1,059,659 packs of illegal cigarettes
valued at $2,945,560,908, reflecting an important panorama in the control and
combating illegal activities related to this product.
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