Shanghai Customs Cracks Ice Wine Smuggling

08/08/2016

On July 20, Shanghai Customs announced an wine smuggling case, in which wine was worth 300 million yuan in total, including 200 million yuan worth of ice wine. Now four suspected smugglers have been arrested.

Imported wine has always been one of the most concerned commodities by Shanghai Customs. In recent years, through anti-smuggling campaigns, the Customs has further regulated wine import in Shanghai. However, some less known brands and varieties of wine are often smuggled in, thus Shanghai Customs started to take tighter control on minority wine and found out ice wine smuggling clues.

Ice wine, brewed by naturally frozen grapes on grapevines, tastes sweet with lower alcohol, mainly produced in Canada, Chile and Germany.

When exercising control over imported wine, the anti-smuggling officers found out abnormal ice-wine importing data. Through data comparing and information collection, the Customs found out two characteristics of ice-wine import: firstly, recent years' total import amount was moderate but grow years by year; ice-wine import volume and value both accounts for about 1% of Shanghai's total wine import; secondly, ice-wine import declaration price shows a downward trend, with declaration prices by specific importers obviously low, for example, some Canada-made ice wine was declared only more than 10 yuan per bottle, differing tens of times from the price on an e-commerce platform.

Through a great deal of investigation, Shanghai Customs finally seized the smuggling suspects. On March 25, the Customs launched a special strike on ice-wine smuggling concurrently in Shanghai, Xi’an, Chengdu, Shenzhen and Xiamen cities, and seized 18 suspects in 4 smuggling cases of low-price declaration.

According to investigation, these four smuggling cases were all in the form of price deception, involving 300 million yuan in total. Therein, the largest chateau involved was in Canada, the chairman Zhang lured Chinese tourists to buy ice wine through tour guides to visit his chateau. When the tourists paid the bill in Canada, Zhang sent the orders to “Shanghai Distribution Center”, then the ice wine was sent to designated addresses in China. Meanwhile, the chateau made counterfeit import declaration forms with declared prices much lower than actual transaction prices. When seized, Zhang confessed the ice wine smuggling.

Other three involved firms directly bought ice wine from external chateaus, and imported them by lower-price declaration, and then made profits from domestic sales by online and real shops.