Newcastle’s biggest ever stash of illegal cigarettes, valued at £80,000, has been unearthed.
More than 120,000 cigarettes were seized in a raid by the city’s trading standards officers at a storage container in the east end on Monday.
It is thought that the huge haul, which included 120,840 suspected illegal cigarettes and 2kg of hand-rolling tobacco, would have had a street value of £30,500 and a full value of £80,000 if duty had been paid.
Council officers swooped on the storage unit, understood to be near Heaton, as part of a crackdown on criminal operations in the city.
Last month, the authority discovered some 6,000 cigarettes hidden in a secret compartment in the toilet of a Byker shop.
And civic centre chiefs have revealed that intelligence gathered from that incident led them to make their biggest ever seizure from a single location on Monday.
Coun Nick Kemp, Newcastle City Council’s cabinet member for environment and regulatory services, said: “This is an outstanding result and is a fantastic reward for our officers who do a huge amount of work in tackling these illegal operations.
“It would have been easy to be satisfied with the original operation but by acting on intelligence we have been able to intercept a vast amount of these dangerous products.
“Illegal cigarettes lead to addiction, they’re incredibly harmful to people’s health, and have links to organised crime.
"No matter what the scale of the operation, we will never allow them to be sold in our city and we will continue to vigorously pursue those breaking the law.”
During the raid at the unnamed shop in Byker , a sniffer dog discovered contraband hidden compartment disguised behind a wall-mounted cabinet.
That operation was part of a two-day crackdown alongside Northumbria Police in which 8,620 cigarettes and 1.35kg of hand-rolling tobacco were seized.
If you have information about the sale of illegal tobacco, you can report it to trading standards by calling 0191 211 6121 or email tradingstandards@newcastle.gov.uk
