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bne April 2018 Southeast Europe I 39
it is ready to refinance an existing European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) loan of €65mn.
However, Varbakova said that Bulgarian banks are not participating in the financing, though she has declined to provide further details.
Meanwhile, Borissov held another phone conversation with Babis, asking for his help should the Bulgarian
INTERVIEW:
government take steps to acquire a stake in CEZ’s assets, the government said
in a statement.
Bulgaria’s President Rumen Radev reacted to the government’s intention to acquire a stake in CEZ’s local assets, saying that its actions are chaotic
and contradict its own previous statements that this is a deal between two private companies where the state cannot intervene in any way.
The deal also has raised the question of why CEZ has not found another buyer, and indeed why it decided to exit Bul- garia, where it posts profits. According to Petr Baran, former operations director of CEZ, the company decided to exit Bul- garia due to the bad business environ- ment and the conflicts with Bulgaria’s government. Baran claimed that no seri- ous company showed an interest in the deal and that CEZ finally decided to sell its assets to an unknown company.
Ileana Dumitru, Head of Legal and External Affairs at British American Tobacco Southern Central European Area
spring of 2017 as a response to
a phenomenon that has again picked up momentum,” added Dumitru.
“It is a first when such a campaign aims at not only raising awareness but at providing authorities with a real tool
BAT battling fake fags in Southeastern Europe
Cristian Gherasim in Bucharest
Last year alone, Romanian state coffers were deprived of €640mn in taxes and excises – money
that could have gone into new schools, hospitals, and propping up Romania’s crumbling infrastructure. The culprit: the illicit tobacco trade that accounts for 16% of Romania’s tobacco market trade.
“Each percentage point in favour of ciga- rette smuggling equates to €40mn lost by the Romanian state”, Ileana Dumitru, Head of Legal and External Affairs at British American Tobacco Southern Central European Area, told bne Intel- liNews in an interview in Bucharest.
Smuggling cigarettes is big business in Romania. According to one study one in every ten contraband cigarettes in the European Union is smoked in Romania. And the impact of the illegal trade is magnified by both the poverty of the areas where it primarily occurs – along the borders of Ukraine and Moldova and the rising prices of cigarettes in Romania due to increased state taxes.
“An uncontrolled price hike would lead to increased demand on a black market fuelled by cigarette smugglers. This will present a risk to national security – financing criminal gangs with cigarette smuggling money – and a public health risk as smuggled cigarettes do not
“The illicit tobacco trade that accounts for 16% of Romania’s tobacco market trade”
comply with any quality standards,” Dumitru said.
Over the past seven years, British Ameri- can Tobacco has been joining forces with other tobacco manufactures and relevant Romanian authorities to fight the fake fags trade, bringing smuggling down from 36.3% in 2010, to 16% at the end of 2017. But there is still a long way to go.
“British American Tobacco has launched the Stop Smuggling campaign in the
to fight back cigarette smuggling. We have made available a real-time map of cigarette busts across the country that provides information on the most volatile regions targeted by smugglers. No such information existed prior to us creating this tool.”
Dumitru goes on: “According to data collected by www.stopcontrabanda.ro, in 2017 authorities managed to seize around 150mn smuggled cigarettes, valued at €17mn.”
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