On July 26, around 2:15 p.m., the customs services decided to check the driver of a van registered in the south of France and who had just crossed the border. On board, a young man of barely twenty. If he follows them without difficulty, he will just omit to reveal to them the nature of his cargo. And for good reason: when customs officers go to search the vehicle, they unearth 40 boxes each containing 50 cartons of cigarettes.
Or 2,000 cartridges or 20,000 packets of a famous American brand once represented by a cowboy. This is still a lot of tobacco (almost 400 kilograms) when we know that the current legislation only authorizes the import of four cartridges per person and soon only one … The origin of the packages is unknown. The wording “duty free” is just stipulated on the packaging boxes.
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400 kg of tobacco
First placed in police custody, the young man domiciled in Port-de-Bouc, was presented Wednesday before the Thionville criminal court. “I had an acquaintance in Belgium who told me that there was a way to do business in this country,” he said at the helm. “At first, I was thinking of buying spare parts. »Finally he will opt for this stock of tobacco, with a total weight of 400 kilograms. “I paid 15,000 euros (Editor’s note: for a market value in France of 200,000 €). It was intended for my personal consumption, even to help out my loved ones, ”he would go so far as to declare.
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“An underground economy”
The council of customs services does not believe for a second in this version. “By earning € 3 per package, he is participating on the contrary in an underground economy,” she believes. The public prosecutor is not convinced either by his explanations. “We can imagine that he did not pay the € 15,000 out of his pocket. “And, to cut short a” delinquency to become “, he will ask for a sentence of 8 months in prison. The defense of the accused, Me Borella, for his part, will stigmatize “the absence of elements in the investigation to demonstrate the existence of trafficking.”
In the end, the court sentenced the young man to a suspended sentence of 4 months, to perform 140 hours of community service, and to pay a customs fine of € 67,000. On this last point, some will say that the Thionville jurisdiction has not cut corners.
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