Close to 8.5 billion sticks of cigarettes were smuggled into the country in the last Iranian year (March 2015-16), indicating an over 29% decline as compared to a year before, according to the Headquarters to Combat Smuggling of Goods and Foreign Exchange Of this amount, only 500 million were confiscated, ISNA reported. Some 29 billion cigarettes were produced inside the country last year, while legal imports stood at 16.4 billion.
