Kosovo customs prevent 30 smuggling attempts in two months

Customs spokesman Adriatic Stavileci, in an interview for Online Economy, has shown that the pandemic has affected all economic spheres in Kosovo, but also has reduced smuggling.

“In terms of smuggling we can't say we have a large smuggling of goods. Customs is always in charge of duty and always keeps preventing suspicious smuggling cases. In the first two months alone, we've had 30 cases where various smuggling has been prevented, and last year has affected the economy even if it is taken for example, it has also contributed to the decrease in smuggling and may be good from pandemic because of the ban on driving”.

He points out that the most frequent cases of smuggling are in tax products.

And we can't say that we have a certain product, years ago we've had mostly accior products that have taxes, but there's generally products that tend to avoid products that have the most tax on regular import and they're good smugglers' products because they're larger than”.

While, he has indicated that more than 8% have increased revenues from Kosovo Customs at this beginning year.

The entry of this year's start-through into Kosovo customs is very good and we have a good start in terms of revenue collection, but usually the aspect of the revenue collection is related to the performance of Kosovo's economy, at the moment we talk about 8% more than last year, so January-February 2021 with the January-February 2020 period. If in 2020 we've had up to 158m euros now we have about 170m euros, which is 8% or a few million more than last year”.