Black market

Police said on Thursday they located a fully equipped illegal tobacco processing and production plant as part of an organized operation in an area of Attica.

Four people were arrested in connection with the case, accused of being members of a criminal organization and running the factory. The case file also includes the landlord, who is being sought by police.

One in three Romanians declares that they would buy smuggled products, found an IRES survey commissioned by the anti-illicit trade association ACTIV on the occasion of the National Day of Fight against Illicit Trade in Goods, which is observed every year on April 21.

The government is aiming at putting an end to the loss of billions of euros in state revenues due to illegal trading, mainly in the fuel sector, through a bill that will reach Parliament next month.

For 10 years - from 2007 to 2016, illegal cigarette trade in Bulgaria has accumulated revenues for the criminal world between 2.5 and 3.5 billion leva, a report by the Institute for Market Economics (IME) writes.

And according to the Russian website, "the lion's share" came from the war-ravaged Balkans to be used "in a number of attention-grabbing cases."

"Today, Scandinavia's streets are awash with foreign and previously unseen gun brands, such as the Serbian Zastava and Czech-Serbian Scorpion machine guns, amid an unparalleled upswing in shooting incidents," the website said.

Some countries have much larger shadow or unofficial economies than others. Greece’s shadow economy is worth over a fifth of its total output, and Italy’s isn’t far behind, says a research by German IAW. However, the chart refers only to selected industrialized countries. And Germany is not doing much better…

The shadow economy costs the Turkish economy 60 billion Turkish Liras ($17 billion) annually, Labor Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu has said, adding that new measures would be taken to slash it.  

The share of the shadow economy in the whole economy is 32 percent, he said. 

A prosecutor in Veria, northern Greece, has issued criminal charges against five suspected members of a racket that has been stealing and reselling trucks for years.

The increase in the special consumption tax on tobacco products from January 1 will entail a 100-million-euro annual loss in state revenues, a report issued by the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE) warned on Monday.

The new report by US NGO Global Financial Integrity entitled 'Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2004-2013' rings alarm bells about the amount of 'black money' leaving the four Balkan countries each year.