UPDATED: 11:55, Aug 5, 2006
CUSTOMS in Nanning City, capital of southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, have smashed a cross-border compact disc smuggling ring.
Officials allege the ring smuggled pirated compact discs worth about 188 million yuan (US$23 million).
Customs officers detained 39 suspects and seized more than 1.76 million pirated compact discs, a local newspaper reported yesterday, citing city customs officers.
The officers allege the ring smuggled a total of 30 million pirated compact discs from Vietnam into China from 2002, and evaded custom duties totalling more than 28 million yuan, the customs said.
On January 27 last year, local customs officers tracked down a truck, and suspected it of smuggling imported duck feathers on a road in Ningming County of the region.
Instead, officers discovered 67,550 pirated DVDs in the truck. Through further investigation, officers found this batch of pirated compact discs were smuggled from Vietnam by a ring in the county's Aidian Town, led by a man surnamed Huang.
Customs officers then, set up a task force to follow the case.
On May 11 last year, investigators received a tip, saying that a group of smugglers were driving a truck of pirated compact discs to Nanning after crossing the Sino-Vietnam border.
Later that day, the task force tracked down 59,000 smuggled compact discs in a warehouse on Wuyi Road in Nanning, and caught two suspects.
In Ningming, investigators also grabbed four suspects, including the major one Huang, and impounded two vehicles involved in the smuggling.
After questioning, customs learned that a Hong Kong businessman had teamed up with a Fujian businessman to invest more than US$10 million to build a plant in a neighboring country.
The plant introduced four state-of-the-art compact disc production lines and specially engaged in pirated DVD and VCD production.
Source: Shanghai Daily