Millions of cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of litres of booze in police custody

The South African Police Service is in possession of more than 24 million cigarette sticks and 700,000 litres of alcohol, seized during the lockdown to enforce regulations banning the sale, distribution and transport of these products.

Between 27 March and 8 July this year, 782,607 litres of alcohol and 24.271,307 cigarette sticks were confiscated, says spokesperson Colonel Brenda Muridili.

Explaining the process, she says once police have confiscated the goods, they are then booked into the SAPS13 client service centre before being transferred to the SAPS 13 exhibit clerk register.

“All property and exhibits seized entered in the SAPS 13 register of the respective police station where the crime was committed or where the property was found. A proper description of every item must be given and it must be identifiable by the written description alone. The quantity of each item must be written.”

“The items seized are then received and signed for by the SAPS 13 official and placed in the SAPS 13 secured storage facility until the criminal case is finalised and a disposal order is received from the detective commander,” explained Muridili.

The banning of the sale of alcohol and cigarettes has in no way removed these products from the streets though, having instead opened up the black market as more people resorted to buying the goods illegally.

Read more: NDZ’s tobacco battle could cost tax payers more than R7m in legal fees

When alcohol was sold from 1 June with strict trading hours of between 9AM and 5PM from Mondays to Thursdays, a secondary market emerged which traded on the other prohibited days, convener of the National Liquor Trade Council Lucky Ntimane says.

“We had a secondary market running Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The confiscation speaks to the illegal market and not the legal taverns. Whoever got their stock confiscated was not a legal trader but someone had gone rogue and knows they are breaking the law. We don’t support anyone breaking the law. I am confident our people are not selling stock. It is the illegal traders who want to sell on the black market,” he says.

The seizure of 24 million cigarettes is nothing compared to the between four and five million illegal packs of cigarettes sold everyday in South Africa during the lockdown, making it about 100 million cigarettes sold illegally daily, says Tax Justice SA founder Yusuf Abramjee.

“If those 100 million cigarettes had been sold in a legal tax-paying market they would have generated an average R35 million a day in sin taxes alone.”

According to a report by the University of Cape Town, the sale of illegal cigarettes has increased since the lockdown and 93% of smokers have been buying illegal cigarettes.

“Before lockdown, one in every three cigarettes sold in South Africa is illegal. Now, every cigarette is illegal. The halt on legal sales is being exploited on an industrial scale by criminal gangs who are producing billions of cigarettes and flooding the country with them. The market is so lucrative, with packets of cigarettes selling for R300-plus in some places…,” Abramjee said.

But had the South African government worked it out right, they could have earned billions in taxes from the alcohol and cigarette trade, instead of spending money trying to halt the revenue income, said economist Mike Schussler.

“If they did their taxes right, they could be getting R2 billion a month from cigarettes trade alone and R2 billion in alcohol trade. They would have more money. It has now been three months and they would have over R12 billion in income.”

Referring to government’s ongoing legal battles against the tobacco and now also the liquor industry, he says: “Now they are spending extra money to stop their own income coming. It doesn’t sound right.”

rorisangk@citizen.co.za

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