Recently, Mr Zhang Qiming and Mr Xu Ming of King&Capital successfully obtained a decision not to prosecute for a case of smuggling of general cargo. In this case, the client commissioned a smuggling group to smuggle goods into the country in the form of package tax price, and was suspected of evading tax of nearly three million yuan. After the intervention, the defender immediately understood the case from the client, comprehensively explored the clues of the case, defended the case from multiple perspectives, and successfully secured a non-prosecution result for the client through a number of circumstances such as unit crime, self-surrender, meritorious conduct, full refund of damages, and guilty plea and acceptance of punishment.

Smuggling cases usually ‘pull out the carrot and bring out the mud’, often due to the seizure of a link in the behaviour of the whole case came to the surface, with the number of people involved in the case, the difficulty of evidence collection, the characteristics of the chain of evidence is incomplete, it is difficult to do the flow of goods, capital flow, the flow of the documents corresponds to the flow of the case, this case is a typical example. The investigators first seized the customs smuggling gang, and then according to the smuggling gang personnel mobile phone weibo chat records to lock the parties involved in this case, the number of goods involved, the value of the goods, the determination of tax evasion through the customs declaration documents and weibo chat records saved in the consignment notes, invoices, courier orders to complete the entire smuggling chain of evidence in fact, it is difficult to achieve a strict corroboration.

The defender started from the problem of evidence in the whole case, proposed that the evidence in the case is difficult to identify the full amount of the alleged tax evasion, the second is that the person concerned as the actual controller of the unit, is for the benefit of the unit decision-making implementation of the act, the profit belongs to the unit, proposed that the case should be identified according to the unit crime, and the active use of the self-surrender, meritorious conduct, the full amount of restitution, guilty plea, etc. A number of circumstances, and third is to retrieve a large number of local cases, and the circumstances of this case The team finally persuaded the procuratorial authorities and secured a non-prosecution result for the party concerned by making a careful comparison.

Since 2023, the Customs and Excise Department has been carrying out the joint special operation of ‘Sharp Sword at the State Gate’, the comprehensive anti-smuggling management has been deepening, and in 2023, 4,959 cases of smuggling offences with a value of 88.61 billion yuan were filed and investigated. 2024, the high-pressure anti-smuggling situation has continued to be maintained, and a large number of smuggling cases have been investigated and dealt with. Despite the tightening of the legal net, but the determination of the crime should still adhere to the evidence standards of criminal cases, comprehensive consideration of the circumstances of the case prudent judgement. King&Capital lawyers successfully defended, in the situation of strict crackdown for the client to get the result of non-prosecution, to achieve the value of the defence work.