SAN SIMON — Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) personnel, together with police officers, swooped down two warehouses on Wednesday, with one turning out to be a factory of suspected fake cigarettes, inside the San Simon Industrial Park here.
The raiding team was led by Revenue Officer Sonny Advincula, head of the BIR Strike Team, which was recently formed as the lead BIR enforcement activities on smuggled items and locally-manufactured counterfeit excisable products.
The first warehouse was found manufacturing filter rods, a cigarette component, the raw material of which is regulated by the BIR and National Tobacco Administration (NTA). The warehouse also yielded millions worth of tobacco raw materials as well as three cigarette making machines and 20 bales of acetate used for making cigarette filters.
About 33.5 million filters (enough to make 1.6 million cigarettes) were recovered from the first warehouse, the BIR said, adding that the operations of the said machines were not registered.
“These machines are supposed to be registered with the BIR so that their production could be imposed with the appropriate taxes,” Advincula said.
In the second warehouse, authorities recovered fake cigarettes and dozens of sacks and boxes of unprocessed tobacco estimated to be worth millions of pesos.
BIR said that all initial testing of the fake cigarettes contained fake tax stamps.
The BIR padlocked the warehouses as appropriate charges are being prepared against owners of said establishments. BIR’s inventory of all the seized materials is also ongoing.
Last year, P2 billion worth of fake cigarettes were also seized inside four warehouses in San Simon Industrial Park. The confiscated materials bear the name of Mighty Corporation as well as its product, Marvel.
It can also be recalled that Mighty Corp. closed shop and its cigarette brands were eventually bought by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) as part of a settlement agreement with the government. JTI paid the government P30 billion to cover Mighty’s excise tax dues.