Got a craving for 'easy' money

The court of the Zheleznodorozhny District of Vitebsk refused to satisfy the claim of the engine drivers of the Polotsk locomotive depot against the UP "Vitebsk Branch of the Belarusian Railway" for reinstatement at work and recovery of average earnings for the period of forced absenteeism.

The Vitebsk Regional Court upheld the said decision.   

During the court hearing, it was established that six engine drivers of the Polotsk locomotive depot were dismissed for committing actions that served as grounds for losing trust in these employees.

Thus, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Republic of Belarus sent a criminal case to court for consideration on the merits, charging a number of residents of the Vitebsk region with committing a crime provided for by Part 3 of Article 228¹ of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus (illegal movement of goods across the customs border).

It was established that in the period from April to October 2016, citizens of the Republic of Belarus, acting as part of an organized group, intentionally carried out repeated illegal movement of Belarusian-made cigarettes across the customs border of the Eurasian Economic Union outside the places of goods movement across the customs border defined by law, using methods that made it difficult to detect the goods during visual inspection without the use of special technical means of customs control, hiding the moved cigarettes in gondola cars with coal, transported by freight trains following the Polotsk-Daugavpils route.

One of the conditions that contributed to the commission of the said crime was the assistance provided for a material reward by the engine drivers of the Polotsk locomotive depot of UP "Vitebsk Branch of the Belarusian Railway" to the organized group leaders, which consisted of informing them about the dates and times of departure of freight trains under their control from Polotsk station to the Republic of Latvia, informing about the inclusion of gondola cars with coal in the train composition, as well as reducing the speed of the trains in certain places, which gave the participants the opportunity

organized group to board the aforementioned gondola cars while in motion and conceal the transported cigarettes.

As a rule, this occurred on sections of the route that had prolonged inclines, which allowed the drivers to reduce speed to a minimum. For this reason, when decoding speedometer tapes, a reduction in the train's speed was not perceived as an extraordinary event.

The active assistance of the drivers to the members of the organized group in committing the crime allowed the latter to illegally transport more than 70 thousand packs of cigarettes to the territory of the Republic of Latvia.

Senior Assistant to the Vitebsk
Transport Prosecutor
Junior Justice Advisor E.A. Kazakova.