© Alexander Ryumin/TASS

MOSCOW, July 18. /TASS/. The Finance Ministry proposes within six months to a year to toughen the punishment for illegal trafficking of unmarked excisable tobacco products. This was reported zamministra of Finance Ilya Trunin at a round table in the Federation Council.

“You need finer control over the retail network, more responsibly, in terms of the state relate to the labelling of tobacco products, because now none of those tools that we use when issuing Federal special stamps for alcoholic products are not used in tobacco products. And therefore more tightly control the retail network, and more severely punished for offences related to trafficking such unmarked excisable products. We believe that this must be done in the next six months or a year,” he said.

According to analysts The Boston Consulting Group, the volume of legal tobacco market in 2018 will amount to 1.5 trillion rubles (12 .5 billion packs), including the revenue of manufacturers of cigarettes in Russia this year, reaching 1.15 trillion rubles. The volume of the illegal tobacco market experts estimate at 100 billion rubles (about 1 billion packs). It is expected that in the years 2017-2018 will continue to rise, but at a slower pace, as in Russia this year in test mode introduced a digital label of cigarettes.

According to analysts, the introduction of the 100% labeling of tobacco products in Russia, illegal turnover of tobacco products in the country may be reduced by 50-60%. In this part of the market will still be illegal due to the existence of sales channels without verification.

In turn, representatives of the tobacco companies JTI, Philip Morris and BAT have previously said that the share of illegal cigarette market in Russia in the first quarter of 2018 7.7% versus 4.6 percent a year earlier. According to their estimates, due to the growth of illegal trade in this year the Russian budget will not receive about 50 billion rubles excise duties.