Cracking down on the smuggling of refined oil, Customs launched the ＂Sword in the East China Sea＂ campaign.

CCTV News:Under the command of the Anti-smuggling Bureau of the General Administration of Customs, the Anti-smuggling Bureau of Ningbo Customs, together with the anti-smuggling departments of Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xiamen and Qingdao, as well as the local public security and marine police, launched the "Donghai Sword" concentrated action against refined oil smuggling in eight provinces and cities including Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Fujian.

This operation destroyed 14 gangs smuggling refined oil products, and verified the smuggling of nearly 1 million tons of refined oil products, with a case value of 5 billion yuan.

At 6 o’clock in the morning, more than 1,500 police officers rushed to arrest the target from their respective assembly points. The customs anti-smuggling police arrested the target figures No.2 and No.7 in the case in a residential area in Haishu District, Ningbo City.　

Smuggling oil carriers are commonly known as mother ships, CMB and minibuses according to their functions. The mother ship is a large-scale oil tanker that travels to the offshore of China to sell smuggled refined oil to domestic oil tankers after loading refined oil abroad.

After investigation by the customs anti-smuggling department, this mother ship is being repaired in Weihai, Shandong Province recently. On the 16th, the customs anti-smuggling police seized the ship at a shipyard in Weihai, and arrested 22 suspects including a number of foreign crew members. At the same time, another 5,000-ton smuggling mother ship of the company involved was also seized in a shipyard in Zhoushan, Zhejiang.

At sea, the East China Sea Branch of China Marine Police and the Second Bureau directly under it dispatched a number of ships, cooperated with the customs anti-smuggling department, and seized the 8,000-ton mother ship "Ocean Success" which was lightering the smuggled refined oil to the China-Pakistan ship.

During the investigation of the case, the customs anti-smuggling department found that the smuggled refined oil gang that was destroyed this time had a strong anti-investigation consciousness.　

In the process of smuggling, mother ships are usually moored offshore, and ships such as "China Pakistan" and "minibus" take night navigation and turn off the automatic ship identification system to escape the supervision of domestic law enforcement departments.

In handling the case, the anti-smuggling police found that in order to increase the concealment of smuggled refined oil transactions, the gang often used cash transactions and even used the number of one-yuan banknotes as the joint code.

In addition to the concealment of the transaction, the smuggling gang in this case also rented oil tanks from a regular oil depot on an island to store smuggled refined oil products that were not distributed in time to maximize profits.