Stricter penalties will be imposed if people are found to have more tobacco products than allowed when entering the country.<\/p>\n
Revenue says the new rules will come into effect on 9 December.<\/p>\n
Manager of Revenue’s Dublin Airport Frontier Management Branch Michael Gilligan has said that the personal allowance is being abused.<\/p>\n
Speaking on RT\u00c9’s Morning Ireland, he said people travelling from another EU country are entitled to bring in 800 cigarettes, 400 cigarillos, 200 cigars and a kilo of tobacco.<\/p>\n
“If somebody brings in more than those amounts, then the total amount of tobacco products that they’re carrying will be seized,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said that the arrangements have only changed in so far as clarity around the consequences of exceeding the amounts.<\/p>\n
“The amounts themselves haven’t changed. They are the same as they were last month, last year and the year before.<\/p>\n
“So, all we’re doing is tightening up on an abuse of a personal use relief that we have identified.<\/p>\n
“And I suppose it’s important to note that the illicit tobacco market is supplied through a range of channels, smuggling, manufacturer, distribution, online sales, but duty, personal relief is also being abused.”<\/p>\n
He said to put that into context, in Dublin Airport, they make over 300 tobacco seizures every month.<\/p>\n
“That’s over ten a day. And in fact, we find that it’s not just individuals that are travelling singly.<\/p>\n
“The vast majority of the 30 million people who come through Dublin Airport every year are very compliant with all the rules and regulations.<\/p>\n
“But in the last eight weeks we have had two instances where we’ve had a number of people who have been related in some way to organised crime, and they’ve come through Dublin Airport, and they were attempting to bring over a third of a million cigarettes in their suitcases.<\/p>\n
“So, this is not Revenue targeting any individual. This is Revenue targeting an abuse of a relief that’s in place.”<\/p>\n
Mr Gilligan said that in one instance there were 12 suitcases between several passengers that were related, that were coming in, and there were nearly a third of a million cigarettes in that.<\/p>\n
“So, sometimes the focus when we use the term personal use relief is on an individual.<\/p>\n
“We’re targeting an abuse of that relief where we see, upwards of 30 seizures a month or ten seizures every day of tobacco products here in Dublin Airport.”<\/p>\n
He said that prosecutions will follow “in all of those very serious, egregious cases.”<\/p>\n
He added that Revenue will not be prosecuting people who are just over the allowance.<\/p>\n
“But I want to emphasise that if you’re over the allowance, all your tobacco products in your possession will be seized.”<\/p>\n
He said that there is adequate staff at Dublin Airport to make the checks required.<\/p>\n
“What we do is we, here in the airport, we have a look at the various risks that we have to contend with between the various types of technologies that we have available to us, including x-ray machines, detector dogs, other technologies and the staff themselves.<\/p>\n
“We believe we have the resources to be able to deal with this,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stricter penalties will be imposed if people are found to have more tobacco products than allowed when entering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-168964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}