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Shanghai woman who smuggled fake Viagra to Africa gets 12 years
Online Edition
A SHANGHAI businesswoman was sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in prison and fined 200,000 yuan (US$33,000) for smuggling fake Viagra products with a market value of up to about 300 million yuan in three shipments meant for Africa since 2009, the Zhejiang Province-based Qianjiang Evening News reported today.
The smuggler is a 57-year-old Shanghai woman, surnamed Zhou, whose family ran a foreign trade company in Africa. Police said the trade company had a history of smuggling fake goods from China to Africa to earn large profits.
Her business started unraveling when some of her exports caught the attention of Zhejiang Customs in March 2012 when inspectors found the declaration did not match the goods to be exported.
A total of 600,000 boxes of fake Viagra were seized. The illegal products turned out to be mainly corn starch, mixed with what was said to be sildenafil powder — the active ingredient in Viagra — obtained from underground suppliers.
The impotence drugs with pornographic pictures printed on the package were to be sold at up to 80 to 90 yuan per box in African pharmacies while the cost of the fake Viagra was only 0.2 yuan, the report said.
The goods, declared to Customs to be photo frames and wrapping tape to be shipped to Africa.
Police also found she was behind two previous shipments of fake Viagra seized by Zhejiang Customs in 2009 and early 2012.
Zhou was caught when she landed at Pudong International Airport in July. Officers said she confessed and revealed her supplier to be a man surnamed Li.
Li was arrested at his home in south China’s Guangzhou city days after.
Police later busted three related underground mills that manufactured the fake Viagra products in Foshan, Guangdong Province, arresting 19 suspects. Police said the workers didn’t have any knowledge of drug formulation and didn’t use any weighing tools when using the underground sildenafil to produce the tablets.
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