The supply of expensive smuggled cigarette brands is likely to dry up for upper echelons of the federal capital, including foreigners and bureaucrats, after the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) moved to check the influx of non-duty paid cigarettes. The Inland Revenue’s Directorate-General of Intelligence and Investigation is learned to have formed a number of mobile teams to survey all markets of Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
Sources said that Islamabad was the hub of policymakers, but the consumption of expensive cigarette brands had become a status symbol for the federal capital’s elite. After the scope of an earlier exercise to check the availability of non-duty paid cigarettes limited to local cigarette manufacturers was broadened to include smuggled foreign cigarettes, the Inland Revenue’s directorate of intelligence would be keeping a close watch over the consumption and the quantity of such cigarettes.
