"Officers of the Chelyabinsk Administration of Economic Security and Combating the Corruption together with operatives of the FSB regional department tracked an organized group, which over the past year produced and sold large wholesale parties of falsified alcohol and alcohol products," - said the MIA official representative Elena Alekseeva.

The production facilities discovered as a result of the operation were located in the territory of two plants occupying a total area of over 4,000 square meters.

The capacity of the lines allowed to produce more than 2,000 boxes of alcohol-containing products of different brands a day, and the turnover of counterfeit alcohol was about 300,000 rubles. The monthly income from illegal trade in counterfeit products exceeded 10 million rubles.

There were conducted simultaneously 14 searches in the production hall, warehouses storing the products and in the homes of detained organizers of the illegal business where law enforcement officers seized: four conveyor lines for the production of counterfeit alcoholic beverages, 56 thousand liters of alcohol, 30 thousand bottles of finished products of 33 brands (vodka: "Arbatskaya", "Belaya Beryoza", "5 ozer", "Belenkaya", "Khortytsa", "Zelenaya Marka", "Finskaya", "Parlament" and etc.; brandy and wine beverages: "Gruzinsky", "Hennessy", "Jack Daniels", "Napoleon", "777", "Bacardi", etc.).

There were also seized 954 cans (of 21.5 liters each) with medical alcohol, 323 boxes and 5 bags (100 liters each) with lids to seal bottles, 15 boxes with labels and excise stamps.

Furthermore, in the production shops there were found about 700,000 empty bottles and accessories for the preparation for the bottling and gluing excise labels on counterfeit products.

All the alcohol was sold in the Chelyabinsk Region, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan regions. As a result of the measures taken the police detained 10 organizers of the criminal group and 35 foreign citizens (natives of the Republic of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) that were involved in the production of counterfeit alcohol and alcohol-containing products, 4 of them were staying on the territory of the Russian Federation illegally.

With regard to this fact the General Investigation Administration of the MIA General Administration for the Chelyabinsk Region indicted three organizers charging them with committing a crime stipulated by Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code "Fraud committed by an organized group or an especially large scale", they were detained pursuant to Art. 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Currently the MIA General Administration for the Chelyabinsk Region in conjunction with the FSB carries out additional investigative-operational measures within the framework of this criminal case.