Travel Agencies Smuggle Hard Currency Through Exploiting Pilgrims, Tourists

Economic and Financial Division of the Judicial Police opened investigations that included five travel agencies, including those incharge of organising Hajj and Umrah, that are implicated in laundering and smuggling money abroad by exploiting tourists and pilgrims, as the owners of these involved agencies transfer the funds abroad by giving them to travellers with a value that do not exceed the limit of 7000 euros, to retrieve them on the plane or after entering the country which they will visit.

Interests that are involved began the investigation, according to Echorouk sources, based on the report on money laundering and smuggling to abroad fraudulently by five tourist agencies, three of them organise trips to the Holy sites, in the framework of performing Hajj and Umrah, and it comes to two agencies in the center, and one of them in the West, what deprives the public treasury, and over decades, from significant fiscal revenues.