Successful investigation into GHB trafficking

31 mai 2015

The Federal Judicial Police of East Flanders opened a file following investigations into the delivery of 20 litres of GBL from abroad to the region of Beveren by an express courier company. These investigations showed fairly soon that the delivery company called on several express courier services to deliver GBL to Belgium. GBL is a substance used to make wheel rim cleaning products, amongst other things, and traditionally enters in the composition of the GHB drug.

Investigations also showed that in a year and a half, about 2,300 litres of GBL were imported into Belgium via a Polish company. This corresponds to more than one million GHB doses and profits of about EUR 6 million.

Under the coordination of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office as well as the Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Judicial Police of East Flanders, an action was undertaken from February until May 2015 against both the company in Poland and customers in Belgium, in cooperation with all local prosecutor’s offices and police services concerned. These actions resulted in 30 summonses as well as many seizures and helped to highlight the GBL issue, to send a signal to the authorities and the population and to explain GBL use trends. The authorities did everything possible to recover the high profits made by drug distributors. The optimal cooperation between the different judicial police units, local police zones and partners such as the National Criminology Institute and the customs was absolutely essential.