40,000 counterfeit excise stamps and thousands of bottles of fake alcohol: the case has been forwarded to the court

 In the Lviv region, the pre-trial investigation has been completed regarding the organizer of an underground facility for manufacturing tobacco products and counterfeit alcohol. The indictment has been forwarded to the court.

According to the investigation, the suspect was not registered as a business entity and did not hold licenses to manufacture tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. Despite this, he set up an underground workshop equipped with machinery that provided a full cycle and mass production.

The production operated as a continuous workflow. The machines shredded tobacco leaves, filled cigarette tubes, packed finished packs, and wrapped them in heat-shrink film.

Concurrently, the suspect bottled alcohol and affixed counterfeit excise tax stamps onto the bottles, which he had purchased from an unidentified person. The products were labeled with the imagery of well-known trademarks so that the counterfeit goods had the appearance of legal merchandise.

During searches in a non-residential building in the Lviv region, law enforcement seized 40,000 excise tax stamps with signs of counterfeiting, approximately 4,800 bottles of alcohol with fake stamps, machinery for tobacco shredding, tube filling, cigarette packaging, and label affixing, dozens of bags of shredded tobacco and boxes of leaf tobacco, cigarettes without excise tax stamps, hundreds of thousands of empty tubes, 36 thousand corks, tens of thousands of labels of various trademarks, containers with a liquid carrying a characteristic alcohol odor, flavorings, and packaging materials.

Detectives of the Territorial Office of the ESBU in the Lviv region have completed the pre-trial investigation. The indictment has been forwarded to court under Part 1 of Article 199 (storage and sale of counterfeit excise tax stamps) and Part 2 of Article 204 (illegal manufacture of excisable goods) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

The prosecution was supervised by the prosecutors of the Lviv Regional Prosecutor's Office.