In the city of Semey, a guilty verdict was issued against three members of a transnational group that illegally traded large amounts of cigarettes without proper identification marks.

The investigation was conducted by the Financial Monitoring Agency's department in the Abay region.

It was found that a group of 8 people, including 3 foreign citizens, illegally brought 9.3 million packs of counterfeit cigarettes from Kyrgyzstan using fake documents.

The cigarettes were sold in the Almaty, Zhambyl, Pavlodar, and Turkestan regions. Some of the products were also intended to be smuggled into Russia.

All of the counterfeit cigarettes were seized, and the unpaid excise taxes amounted to 2.6 billion tenge.

To recover losses, authorities seized 9 vehicles and a private house.

Additionally, during the investigation, the court approved the confiscation of criminally obtained property before trial: $157,000 in cash and a VIP car license plate “777” worth 840,000 tenge were taken.

The court found Bekeshev D., Satybaldiev D., and Sultanov D. guilty of being part of a transnational organized group (Article 264 Part 2 of the Criminal Code) and illegal business activities (Article 214 Part 2, points 1 and 3). They were sentenced to 8 years in prison, and all confiscated property worth 166 million tenge was taken by the state.

The other five members of the group are internationally wanted. One of them has been arrested in Russia, and Kazakhstan has sent a request for his extradition.