Newport City Council has closed four shops in the city centre after its trading standards team along with Gwent Police Tarian and the Intellectual Property Office, seized a large amount of illegal produce in the process.
Among the items recovered were 23,390 illegal cigarettes, 4.9kg in hand-rolling tobacco and 2,013 vapes. The council branded the raids “another successful operation to crackdown on illicit trading”. However, they would not confirm which shops had been raided.
“Investigations,” the council said, “are ongoing.”
This is not the first time such an operation has uncovered a large number of illegal tobacco products in the city. Not even a month ago, Gwent Police discovered more than 5,000 illegal cigarettes and 650g of tobacco stashed inside a vehicle on Commercial Road.
Back in December of last year, it was revealed that in the previous 12 months, more than one million cigarettes had been confiscated in the city. Newport City Council revealed that there were 12 seizures of items with an estimated retail value of £746,000 consisting of more than 1.3 million cigarettes and 172kg of hand-rolling tobacco.
Nineteen anti-social behaviour closure orders were obtained and it is estimated this prevented a minimum £850,000 of further illicit tobacco sales taking place. Four prosecutions resulted in penalties including fines, unpaid work and costs. More than 200 businesses were inspected, with 1,524 illegal vapes seized. The combined value was in the region of £14,000. The illegal vapes were removed from sale in 20 premises.
The ‘No ifs. No Butts’ campaign, funded by the Welsh Government, outlined the most common examples of what is defined by illegal tobacco. This includes ‘cheap whites’ which are mass produced in one country and smuggled into another, cheap genuine tobacco smuggled into the UK with no-duty paid (with packages often in foreign languages and with a lack of health warnings), cigarettes sold individually instead of in packets and counterfeits or fakes which look like well-known brands but are made illegally.
