MOSCOW, March 16. Forgery of excise stamps on alcohol should be set equal to the forgery of banknotes, for which the law prescribes punishment of 15 years in prison to life imprisonment. This opinion was expressed on Wednesday at a meeting on regulating the market of alcoholic production, the head of the Federation Council Committee on budget and financial markets Sergey Ryabukhin.
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The Senator said that now the fake Federal excise stamps for alcohol in the Criminal code “the fines from 300 thousand to 500 thousand rubles”, in rare cases – for the manufacture of counterfeit brands – 3 years of imprisonment, and up to 5 years for their distribution, “when talking about the damage in the hundreds of billions of rubles”. He also cited expert data according to which, last year, the damage to the budget from the sale of alcoholic beverages with counterfeit brands “was about 200 billion rubles.”
“Our proposal is the strengthening of criminal responsibility. I mean that we should equate the fake Federal excise stamps to the counterfeiting of currency,” said Ryabukhin, Recalling that for this offence in the criminal code punishable from 15 to 25 years of imprisonment, and in the case of a crime by a group of persons upon a preliminary collusion, – up to life imprisonment. “To be sure, the evaluation of the crimes are completely different,” he said.
