Catalan police shut down counterfeit fragrance plant making tens of millions of bottles

A clandestine manufacturing facility churning out as much as 4 million counterfeit bottles yearly has been dismantled by Catalan police, Spanish authorities stated on Tuesday, February 17.

Seven folks had been arrested and 11 others positioned beneath investigation on suspicion of belonging to a legal group, smuggling, and infringing industrial property rights. The community allegedly counterfeited perfumes from greater than 50 manufacturers.

Though the operation was uncovered in October, the arrests and searches had been carried out on February 8 as a part of a large-scale operation involving Spanish and French customs authorities and the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalan police), in line with a press launch.

Authorities seized over 1.2 million counterfeit merchandise from three warehouses close to Girona, simply south of the French border. Based mostly on the retail worth of genuine items, their estimated worth exceeds EUR 94 million.

Seven manufacturing strains

The manufacturing facility — described as “the biggest counterfeit fragrance manufacturing facility uncovered in Europe up to now” — had seven manufacturing strains, in addition to sufficient uncooked supplies to provide 150,000 litres of varied fragrances.

The community was extremely organized, overseeing each stage of manufacturing — from storage and labelling to packaging — and was outfitted with all the required equipment, together with printing plates for the outer bins.

Officers seized greater than 850,000 counterfeit perfumes at one warehouse and an extra 350,000 at one other website. Additionally they confiscated the total vary of manufacturing gear, together with bottles, caps, spray pumps and packaging supplies.

The alert got here from French customs, which, after intercepting a number of thousand counterfeit bottles in bins labeled “very fragile,” notified their Spanish counterparts. Subsequent surveillance uncovered a trafficking community transport the products to France and different European international locations utilizing vans and vans registered in Romania and elsewhere.