The Guardia di Finanza and the Carabinieri of the Turin provincial commands, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office, have identified and seized five manufacturing plants and two warehouses used for storing contraband cigarettes . Inside the facilities, they found over 230 tons of non-EU processed tobacco and approximately 22 tons of cigarettes, mostly pre-packaged with well-known counterfeit brands. Investigators also found 538 million components, including filters, papers, and cardboard used to assemble the packets .
It is estimated that at least 35 million packets were produced for a profit of 175 million euros , with excise duty evasion of 112 million and VAT evasion of 28 million . Eight arrests were made. The operation, called Chain Smoking , was carried out not only to combat the smuggling of manufactured tobacco, but also to combat crimes such as slavery, human trafficking, illicit intermediation and labor exploitation. The production sites and warehouses were discovered by the Turin economic and financial police unit of the Fiamme Gialle and the Carabinieri company of Venaria Reale. The factories were camouflaged in industrial areas, equipped with production lines with expensive machinery, equipment and technological tools. The warehouses were located in the northern area of the Piedmont capital, in the neighborhoods of Madonna di Campagna, Barca and Rebaudengo and in the municipalities of Caselle Torinese and Venaria Reale. The facilities were powered by generators to conceal the presence of machinery operating at full capacity from peak electricity consumption. The windows facing the outside were blacked out, and the innermost areas, lit only artificially, housed accommodations for personnel from Eastern European countries, who lived in exploitative conditions and disregarded safety regulations.
Workers were effectively locked in factories, forced to work grueling shifts, without rest, and deprived of any form of protection. Assessments of some assembly lines estimated that each could produce 48,000 packs of cigarettes per day, resulting in an estimated volume of at least 35 million packs, or 700 tons of product, being released onto the illegal market. During the operation, eight people, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Moldovan nationals, were arrested red-handed. Following the seizures, the Turin Office of the Customs and Monopolies Agency and the Provincial Fire Brigade Command were involved, tasked with managing the large quantity of material found, which was then destroyed with the support of the Metropolitan City of Turin.
(Unioneonline)