Smuggling in An Giang Province still has not cooled down

An Giang police confiscated illegal cigarettes

Complex development

According to surveys of An Giang’s functional forces, currently, outside the border with Cambodia there are 26 warehouses for gathering, trading and transporting goods into Vietnam. The border areas have 6 warehouses (mostly in An Phu District), some of them associated with warehouses outside the borders are the places for gathering smuggled goods to transport into Vietnam. Besides, alongside the Cambodian border, there are many warehouses storing smuggled goods and cockfight pits, casinos. Thus, there are still many cases where Vietnamese people surreptitiously carry money, foreign currencies across the border for buying smuggled goods, gambling and cockfights.

Facing the situation, the functional forces in An Giang Province have strengthened the control and inspection, detecting 914 cases of trade and transportation of prohibited goods, smuggled goods, worth over 28.5 billion VND. Of which there are nearly 700,000 packets of foreign cigarettes, over 160 tons of sugar. The functional forces prosecuted 20 cases with 21 subjects (an increase of 17 cases and an increase of 18 subjects) compared to the same period in 2017; the value of material evidences of prosecution was over 1.9 billion VND, equivalent to $US 1,205; commodities are drugs, firecrackers, cigarettes.

An Giang Customs alone has deployed many professional measures, has coordinated for the effective seizure of smuggling cases such as the illegal transport of over 75 tonnes of rice across borders (cases have been prosecuted). The Customs Inspection Team together with the Vinh Hoi Dong Border Gate Customs Sub-Department inspected, arrested, and seized nearly 2 tons of old clothes and 1,000 packages of cigarettes.

Khanh Binh Border gate Customs Sub-Department in cooperation with Long Binh Town Police - An Phu District and Long Binh Border Guard Station went to inspect the warehouse belonging to Mrs. Truong Thi Dung (address No. 19, Tan Thanh Ward, Long Binh district, An Phu district, An Giang province) discovered and arrested for a violation concerning 6 tons of white sugar which were ready to be put on a car for trading under the Ngoc Bich brand, and 70 bags of sugar packaging from Thailand.

Tinh Bien International Border Gate Control Station, Tinh Bien Border Gate Customs Sub-Department in coordination with the Customs Control Team and Tinh Bien Border Guard Station conducted the inspection of transport means with the license plate number 3C-6879 driven by Meach Phearum to make the customs procedures. The functional forces detected 2,544 items of stick wood, with a total weight of over 3.2 tons.

Need long-term measures

According to the Steering Committee of 389 of An Giang Province, tricks for smuggling in the area are not new, but are still effective because the functional forces have no operational detection measures. Smugglers only change the time, place and delivery method. In order to cope with the functional forces, smugglers always send watchers throughout the operation to inform each other, frequently changing locations, means of delivery, use of turnaround invoices and other sales records... Especially, in the process of organizing activities, the smugglers have calculated very closely, shifting responsibility of compensating smuggled goods for the transporters, so the anti-smuggling forces often encountered the frustration from the objects of transport.

In An Giang, the majority of people in the border areas do not have stable jobs, the legal awareness of people in the border areas is not high, the lack of jobs to stabilize their lives makes them easy targets to be used by the smuggled to join, to transport smuggled goods, to fight against the functional forces. To limit this situation, the An Giang Provincial Public Security has made a list of 527 subjects and 65 locations in key areas to raise awareness, to deter subjects on the list; encourage them to change job, or to propose the commissariat, the local government to help create conditions for them to change jobs to ensure their lives.

At the conference on deploying the fight against smuggling, trade fraud and illegal cross-border transportation in Southwestern Provinces in June 2018, the Standing Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh, pointed out the most fundamental solution in the struggle against smuggling is to take care of people's life in the border areas, raise people's intellectual standards, and social security to build the people's defense posture and people's security; propagandize to the people to not help smugglers. Local governments should have a policy to invite businesses to invest in border areas, create jobs, increase income for the people. The State will adopt preferential policies for enterprises investing in the border areas.