Millions of cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of litres of booze in police custody via TheCitizen_News
The South African Police Service is in possession of more than 24 million cigarette sticks and 700,000 litres of alcohol, seized during the lockdown to enforce regulations banning the sale, distribution and transport of these products. Between 27 March and 8 July this year, 782,607 litres of alcohol and 24.271,307 cigarette sticks were confiscated, says spokesperson Colonel Brenda Muridili.
Explaining the process, she says once police have confiscated the goods, they are then booked into the SAPS13 client service centre before being transferred to the SAPS 13 exhibit clerk register. The banning of the sale of alcohol and cigarettes has in no way removed these products from the streets though, having instead opened up the black market as more people resorted to buying the goods illegally.When alcohol was sold from 1 June with strict trading hours of between 9AM and 5PM from Mondays to Thursdays, a secondary market emerged which traded on the other prohibited days, convener of the National Liquor Trade Council Lucky Ntimane says.
“If those 100 million cigarettes had been sold in a legal tax-paying market they would have generated an average R35 million a day in sin taxes alone.”
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