Customs busts importer selling smuggled goods to supermarkets

The Macau Customs Service (SA) has revealed that the owner of a trading company is under investigation, with his firm alleged to have sold smuggled liquor, non-staple foods and food products that were not quarantined for local supermarkets.
Information suggests that the trading firm has been in operation for more than a decade at the Border Gate district. It is alleged that parallel traders have been employed to smuggle goods into Macau in very small quantities each time. The firm then sold the goods to three supermarket chains in Macau, involving 47 shops.
SA says that it received a tip-off from a food distributor  claiming that the volume of sales of some products was dropping at an unusual rate, which has affected business. The agent suspected that someone was smuggling goods into Macau. It also claimed that the trading firm in question was organizing for parallel traders to bring goods into Macau, and had used the parallel trader gathering point to distribute the goods to multiple supermarkets and stores.
SA thus launched an operation on September 18 and searched the trading firm. During the operation, SA officials saw parallel traders still bringing goods to the company. They also found a total of 1,000 liters of untaxed liquors from 24 mainland brands, 4,700 kilograms of non-staple food products and 91 kilograms of food products that were not quarantined.
The owner of the business admitted that the firm had been operating in this manner for more than a year. Every parallel trade will receive MOP3 to MOP5 for each box of products.
SA has also inspected the 47 shops of the three supermarket chains and found another 2,000 liters of allegedly untaxed liquor, 316 kilograms of non-staple food products and 286 food products requiring quarantine. It is estimated that the authorities have confiscated more than 10 tons of allegedly smuggled foods, which is worth more than MOP500,000.
The managers of the three supermarket chains all claimed that they were not aware of the sources of their products. SA has urged local supermarkets and stores to only source from legal food suppliers. JPL