A WOMAN who failed three times to pay excise duty at Dublin airport after bringing a total of 80,980 cigarettes into the country, has been remanded on bail pending sentence by Judge Katherine Delahunt.
Tugsuu Myagmar (30), of Mountjoy Square, who is from Mongolia, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to evasion of excise duty on dates between August 6th, 2005 and April 9th, 2006. She had no previous convictions and the cigarettes were valued at €25,411.
Judge Delahunt adjourned the case to next April and requested a probation report for that date.
Customs officer Niall Jennings told Dominic McGinn, prosecuting, that the first two occasions Myagmar was found to have the cigarettes in her luggage she claimed that they were for her own use and that of her family but when she was stopped in the airport on April 9th, she admitted she had intended to sell them. Myagmar has been living with her husband in Ireland since 2004 and has been studying English here.
Mr Jennings agreed with Ronan Kennedy, defending, that Myagmar had co-operated with Customs staff and had not come to Garda attention since. Mr Kennedy said his client and her husband left their young child with his parents in Mongolia to come to Ireland to try and make a better life for themselves.