BDTP Reveals UK Fag and Booze Heroes

From The Telegraph

BDTP (Blokes Down The Pub) have decided to publish the role of honour to celebrate the men who save the public millions on booze and fags.
The names on the Honour Role are described as “Robin Hoods who have got us all cheap fags and booze,  instead of the money going to government to piss away on high-speed rail and sporting events that hardly anyone cares about”

The Honour Role includes
Hussain Asad Chohan, 44, believed to be in Dubai. He is celebrated for importing 2.25 tonnes of tobacco, saving hard-working smokers £750,000.
Leigang Liang, 38, believed to be in the UK, was honoured for illegally importing tobacco from China. The estimated saving to smokers was £2.6 million.
Wayne Joseph Hardy, 49, now believed to be in South Africa, was honoured for manufacturing tobacco products and not paying duty. The estimated saving to smokers was £1.9 million.
Gordon Arthur, 60, believed to be in the United States, honoured for illegally importing cigarettes and alcohol, saving smokers and drinkers around £15 million.
Emma Elizabeth Tazey, 38, also believed to be in the United States, is celebrated for the same savings.
Malcolm McGregor McGowan, 60, believed to be in Spain, is celebrated for illegally importing cigarettes saving around £16 million to smokers.
Dimitri Gaskov, 27, thought to be in Estonia, smuggled three million cigarettes into the UK using desktop computers.
Mohamed Sami Kaak, 45, thought to be in Tunisia, is celebrated for smuggling millions of cigarettes into the UK between March 2005 and September 2006 and saving taxpayers around £822,000 in duty.

Truth Much Stranger Than Fiction (Finger Lickin' Edition)

South Park

Meanwhile, Cartman seeks KFC chicken on the black market by working for Billy Miller, a local boy who runs a small KFC cartel from his home. After Cartman demonstrates his ruthlessness against a cheating street dealer as well as paying his turf to Billy as promised, Billy sends him to Corbin to buy chicken directly from Colonel Sanders. Another boy named Tommy accompanies Cartman, but he is revealed to be an informant for healthy foods advocate Jamie Oliver and executed by the Colonel's men by hanging him from a helicopter exactly like the scene from Scarface. 

Gaza

For six years, Rafat Shororo longed for the taste of a KFC sandwich he had eaten in Egypt. This week, he got his finger lickin' fix at home in the Gaza Strip after a local delivery company managed to smuggle it from Egypt through underground tunnels.
"It has been a dream, and this company has made my dream come true," says Mr. Shororo, an accountant, as he receives his order from the delivery guy.
The al-Yamama company advertises its unorthodox new fast-food smuggling service on Facebook. It gets tens of orders a week for KFC meals despite having to triple the price to 100 shekels ($30) to cover transportation and smuggling fees. The deliveries go from the fryers at the Al-Arish KFC joint 35 miles away to customers' doorsteps in about three hours.

(incidentally, it's one of my favourite South Park episodes, providing both social commentary on economics, while also having a lot of fun with cultural references)

Reasons to reduce cigarette duty

From The Daily Mail:

One in seven cigarettes is either smuggled or fake, a study of discarded packets has found.

The black market tobacco, most of which contains far higher levels of chemicals such as lead, arsenic and cadmium (1), is costing the country an estimated £2billion a year in unpaid taxes. (2)

Trading standards officers in Lincolnshire collected more than 1,350 discarded cigarette packets, with only six out of seven of them found to be legal.

1) The article does not make clear why the manufacturers of smuggled cigarettes put extra cadmium and lead in them, those are expensive minerals aren't they? I mean, surely this is not just a baseless horror story to frighten people into smoking duty-paid cigarettes, is it?

2) No it doesn't, it doesn't cost "the country" a penny, does it? One man's cost is another man's saving. It doesn't even cost "the government" £2 billion, they should be thankful for the £12 billion easy money they docollect, not go weeping over the £2 billion they don't. Further, if a sixth of smokers quit smoking overnight, would the government moan that it's cost them £2 billion? Possibly, but if so, that must mean that the three-quarters of adults who don't smoke collectively cost the government about £42 billion in unpaid taxes.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

It is good to see the government has decided to make cigarettes and under-the-counter item in shops. I'm quite confident that removing them will cut their appeal and destroy the market for them; after all, look at how effective it has been at eliminating the drugs culture in this country.

On the other hand, isn't this proposition that antithesis of the government's stance that removing books from view, by closing all the libraries, will not reduce reading?

Beyond this, I think the government is unwise to contemplate the idea of only allowing the sale of cigarettes in unmarked, unbranded boxes. Surely this would only serve to make the smuggling and selling of counterfeit cigarettes, already a major problem, even simpler.

Not only would this remove a revenue stream from HMRC, but it would also increase the funding sources for criminal and terrorist organisations.

Julian Self, Buckinghamshire.

Pecunia non olet?

From The Daily Mail: Pensioner caught 'trying to smuggle $170,000 cash through customs in her UNDERWEAR'