The share of illegal tobacco products in the Russian market has decreased to 11.3%, Vladislav Zaslavsky, head of the Department of digital labeling of goods and legalization of product turnover at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said at a press conference.
"The dynamics of the last year is as follows: 13.3% of illegal trafficking in July 2023, 12.6% in December 2023, 11.3% in July 2024," he said.
According to him, this was the result of the introduction of labeling of tobacco and nicotine-containing products, granting Rospotrebnadzor additional powers to monitor compliance with mandatory labeling requirements in retail, as well as the application of measures provided for in the Code of Administrative Offenses against violators.
According to Zaslavsky, in the first quarter, Rospotrebnadzor conducted unscheduled control measures for 1.5 thousand points of sale, which is almost three times more than in the first quarter of 2023. In the same quarter, 415 administrative cases were initiated for failure to provide information to the labeling system. This measure was not applied a year ago.
Zaslavsky also noted that now 278 thousand legal outlets sell tobacco products in the country, which is 67% more than in 2019, when labeling was introduced.
The results of the VI All-Russian field study on determining the share of illicit tobacco trafficking in Russia were presented at the press conference. According to Irina Bushina, director of the National Scientific Center of Competencies in the field of combating illicit trafficking in industrial products, the share of illegal tobacco products at 11.3% is an indicator in terms of smokers. In terms of the entire population, it is 11.7%.
According to her, despite the decline, there is still a lot of work to whitewash the market. "11.3% is still a lot. And in specific figures of lost budget revenues, this is about 100 billion rubles," she said.
Bushina also said that cigarettes illegally imported into Russia from the EAEU countries still account for the largest part of the illegal turnover - 56.6%. Moreover, 86.8% are of Belarusian origin. The share of cigarettes illegally imported from Armenia decreased by 2.4 percentage points to 11.2%, while illegal imports from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan account for no more than 2% in total.
Revaz Yusupov, Deputy General Director of the CRPT (operator of the labeling system), said at a press conference that 7 artisanal tobacco industries were closed this year and the sale of 70 million illegal packs was blocked. "In total, 52 enterprises that illegally produced cigarettes and tobacco products were closed during the operation of the label. Last year there were 15 of them," he said.
Speaking about the implementation of the digital excise project, Yusupov said that the functionality of the new module has been working since July 1. It makes it possible to control the issuance of labeling codes to manufacturers and importers under interim measures, which allows you to abandon paper excise stamps. The labeling system in Russia is ready to switch to digital excise duty, he noted. "For 2.5 years now, we have been comparing our data and the data of the tax service in order to understand that there are no discrepancies and we can safely switch to calculating and calculating excise taxes through the labeling system. We see that the data discrepancy is minimal," Yusupov said.
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