London Raids
Westminster City Council conducted a raid on an Oxford Street business, clearing £100,000 of illegal stock from shelves
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by Dave Cross
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Among the huge haul, the police also removed 23 products, which stated they contained cannabis, for testing, 420 counterfeit vapes, and 2,366 Snus tins (a moist form of smokeless tobacco which is usually placed under the upper lip) with no English labelling.
It is the second raid on an Oxford Street tourist “souvenir” shop in the space of a fortnight. On March 29 over 1,500 counterfeit goods worth more than £22,000 were removed.
The list of items taken away in the latest raid which took place yesterday (April 6) morning also included:
- Counterfeit mobile phone covers with the trademarks of Kenzo, Louis Vuitton, Nike amongst others
- Counterfeit Apple Airpods
- Counterfeit Sony PS4 consoles
- USB Chargers with no safety labelling
- Unlabelled packets of shisha tobacco
Raj Mistry, Executive Director of Environment & City Management at Westminster City Council, said that the raid showed the local authority’s commitment to keeping Westminster clean and safe.
He said: “We are putting these questionable traders on notice that they will not be tolerated in our city. We’ll continue to take action against such unsafe trading activities in order to keep our residents and visitors safe.
“We will not allow those selling illegal or counterfeit goods in Westminster to keep up such unsafe practices. Sooner or later we will identify such illegal trading and we will seek prosecutions and the maximum fines.”
Assisting in the raid was John Dunne, the Director-General of the Westminster based UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) which is the largest trade body for the vaping sector.
He said: “Trading in a safe and compliant manner is at the heart of our organisation’s values. As a body we work closely with Trading Standards officers across the country to get rid of these rogue sellers, which give our industry as a whole a bad name.
“It is important to ensure adult consumers can purchase safe products while also keeping them out of the hands of young people.
“We can offer extensive product knowledge, training and tools to officers as well as liaising with brand owners directly in the UK and China to identify items being sold that are fake – and hopefully that will aid in any criminal charges.
“We look forward to working very closely with the Westminster team in the future.”
References:
- The UK Vaping Industry Association - https://www.ukvia.co.uk/
Photo Credit:
Banner image photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous vape companies to develop content for their websites.
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