AmCham Serbia and AmCham Montenegro brought together the main actors in the fight against illegal trade at the conference “Regional Conference on Combating Illegal Trade”, which was held from May 30th to June 1st in Montenegro.
Further development
The conference brought together representatives of inspection, customs, and police bodies, as well as other relevant actors responsible for combating illegal trade and protection of intellectual property rights, as well as representatives of the economy from four countries – Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and Croatia.
”Better cooperation between state bodies, as well as the state and the economy of the region, with the aim of combating illegal trade, is one of the priorities towards creating a stable business environment necessary for the successful realization of existing and attracting new investments,” Amalija Pavic, Deputy Executive Director of AmCham Serbia, emphasized.
Successful actions
On behalf of BiH, Miro Dzakula, Director of the Indirect Taxation Authority (ITA) of BiH, and Zoran Galic, Director of the BiH Border Police, participated in the conference.
”In recent years, ITA has been recording increasingly significant results in combating the black market in tobacco and tobacco products. In 2021 alone, the officials of all four groups the suppression of violations and smuggling in the ITA prevented the illegal trade in cigarettes and tobacco worth 5.5 million BAM. We have really had many successful actions, especially in cooperation with the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH and the State Investigation and Protection Agency of BiH (SIPA), which also resulted in the fact that last year for the first time we had an increase in the number of issued excise stamps, for the first time since 2009, when the excise policy in BiH began to be harmonized with EU legislation,” Dzakula stated.
As another encouraging fact he mentioned that in 2022, the number of issued excise stamps for marking cigarettes and tobacco continued to grow, by about 30 percent.
”Every country, including BiH, strives to reduce the level of the gray economy and to transfer as much of the illegal market of tobacco and tobacco products as possible to legal flows. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to achieve quality cooperation with customs authorities from neighboring countries. Many agreements on cooperation on customs issues have been signed, and contact points have been established for the exchange of operational information with the Customs Administration of the Republic of Croatia, the Customs Administration of the Republic of Serbia, the Revenue and Customs Administration of Montenegro, the Customs Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, as well as the Customs Administration of the Republic of Turkey,” Dzakula pointed out.
