Illicit cigarettes last year accounted for 18.7% of Lithuania's total tobacco product market, down by 9.6 percentage points year-on-year. If these cigarettes had been purchased legally, the government would have raised around 66 million euros in additional tax revenues, the study showed.
Belarus remained the largest source of illicit tobacco, with illicit cigarette inflows from the neighboring country dropping by 40% in 2015 compared with 2014 to 530 million units.
Some 53 billion illegal cigarettes were consumed in the EU in 2015, accounting for about 10 percent of the total market.
In Latvia, illicit cigarettes last year made up 26.7% of the market, as compared with 20.8% in Norway and 19.8% in Greece.
