A vast cigarette smuggling operation across the Balkans once centered around illegal factories in Niš, Skopje, Mojkovac, Rovinj, and Sarajevo, according to a report by Montenegro’s RTCG portal. The network, allegedly involving state institutions, continues to echo in the region, despite periodic crackdowns.
Fifteen years ago, these illicit routes supplied counterfeit cigarettes from Niš to Hungary and the EU, and from Skopje to Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, and beyond. Mojkovac served as a key point for shipments to Kosovo and southern Italy, while Rovinj’s factory – which reportedly still operates branches in Dubai and Morocco – moved product into the UK, Spain, Italy, and France.
A former Montenegrin police officer told RTCG that Rožaje, a northern town near the Kosovo border, functioned as a massive storage hub for contraband. The smuggling routes, he said, often overlapped with narcotics corridors and were controlled by similar criminal groups.
Several police officers who spoke out about the trade – including Enver Dacić and Mithat Nurković – were dismissed at the time, only to be reinstated later under EU pressure. They alleged that trucks carrying between 500 and 1,000 boxes of cigarettes passed through Rožaje three times a week, depending on conditions for safe passage.
Video footage submitted to parliament’s security committee reportedly showed Albanian traffickers transferring goods from warehouses into remote mountain passes. One such site, on the Kula pass between Giljevo Polje and Crni Vrh, became an improvised warehouse for excise goods, mainly cigarettes.
One officer said he once stopped a caravan of 120 packhorses carrying an estimated 1,400 boxes. “We were told to let them go. It was a ‘program’. That meant someone in power had approved it,” he said.
Despite border enforcement, seizures on the Montenegrin side were negligible compared to volumes flowing into Kosovo. At one point, according to RTCG, international police found more than 300 tonnes of cigarettes in the Dukađini warehouse near Peja (Peć), reportedly shipped from Montenegro. Kosovar businessmen Ekrem Luka and Naser Keljmendi were detained, but released for lack of evidence.
A British MI6 documentary cited by RTCG described the scale of the industry, identifying major illegal cigarette factories in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. A single container of counterfeit cigarettes could be purchased for EUR 200,000 and sold in the UK for up to EUR 2 million. In Romania alone, counterfeit cigarette trade was valued at over EUR 8 billion in 2011.
In Kaliningrad, one factory reportedly produced 400 packs per minute—amounting to 120 containers a month. Smugglers bought a container there for EUR 70,000 and sold it for EUR 4.4 million in Western Europe.
At the time, six companies in Montenegro were officially licensed to trade tobacco, but many were also engaged in smuggling. Intelligence agencies were aware of these networks, sources for RTCG say, but action only intensified with the arrest of former national security agent Mujo Mujević, alleged to be the right-hand man of senior police official Zoran Lazović in what was described as a “state smuggling project.”
Mujević, now regarded locally as a wealthy businessman and investor, reportedly amassed a fortune worth around EUR 40 million through a mix of real estate and liquid assets.
“He must have saved well on a police salary,” one source told RTCG.