Judge hands 6 months house arrest, tax bill of nearly $2M to 21-year-old cigarette smuggler

A 21-year-old man caught with more than two million illegal cigarettes in a U-Haul van at a Winnipeg motel has been given six months of house arrest — and a tax bill of nearly $2 million.

Aaditya Raj Hooda, an international student who lives and goes to school in southern Ontario, pleaded guilty Tuesday to possessing more than 25 unmarked units of tobacco under the provincial Tax Administration and Miscellaneous Taxes Act in front of Winnipeg provincial court Judge Cynthia Devine.

Crown prosecutor Shaun Sass described the untaxed smokes seized in late 2024 from Hooda’s rented U-Haul, combined with more than two million more found in a motor home stopped at the same motel, as among the most significant seizures of unmarked tobacco in Manitoba history.

“When you combine it to 4.2 million cigarettes in total… that puts us in the top three cigarette seizures in Manitoba of all time,” said Sass. “The global picture, we’re dealing with a fairly large amount of cigarettes.”

Devine accepted a joint recommendation from Sass and the man’s defence lawyer, Hayley Allardyce, to give him six months of house arrest, followed by six months of probation, and the tax bill to the Manitoba government of $1,864,800. Other tobacco-related charges were stayed.

His house arrest will allow him to continue attending school and work at a convenience store on a strict schedule.

The joint recommendation came out of what both lawyers described as a “true” plea bargain, considering issues with the search warrants police used and Charter rights concerns, that the defence could have argued at a trial.

Sass told court that Winnipeg Police Service officers were told by a confidential source of a possible large shipment of illegal cigarettes headed to Winnipeg from Ontario in December 2024.

“They received word on Dec. 23 of 2024 that a convoy of vehicles was on its way into Manitoba,” said Sass. “There was a U-Haul moving van, which was at the Super 8 Motel on Niakwa Road, there was also an RV and a Honda CRV that were still making their way to Winnipeg.”

 

 

Officers went to the motel and stopped the drivers of the Honda and motor home in the parking lot, then found Hooda in his motel room, along with another co-accused.

Police, armed with search warrants, found 2,072,000 cigarettes in the U-Haul and 2,198,000 cigarettes in the motor home. Hooda is taking responsibility only for the smokes found in the U-Haul.

As of 2025, about 40 per cent of all cigarettes sold in the province are illegal, said Sass. They are sold at a much cheaper rate than heavily taxed legal cigarettes.

“It is a problem,” said Sass. “An amount this large is clearly meant for commercial purposes. Nobody’s smoking this many cigarettes in their life, so it’s certainly not personal use.”

The prosecutor did not detail for whom Hooda is believed to have smuggled the smokes. Sass said illegal smokes smuggled at this scale likely came direct from a factory and the profits to be made would be significant.

Allardyce said Hooda was wilfully blind when he accepted an offer from a friend of a friend to drive some packages to Winnipeg without asking further questions, despite a suspicion there was more to the story.

 

 

“It was difficult to support himself — he doesn’t have parents here (in Canada). He was looking for another job to make a bit of extra money,” said Allardyce. “He had a feeling that maybe something wasn’t quite right, then unfortunately, he chose not to ask those further questions.”

She said Hooda came from India to study on a student visa in 2022 when he was still a teenager.

The tax bill amounts to triple the tax levied on each of the cigarettes seized, said Sass.

If the others caught with illegal tobacco at the motel alongside Hooda, who remain before the court, are also found guilty, the tax bill will be split with them. Sass said the tax debt is up to Manitoba Finance to enforce and up to Hooda to figure out a payment plan with officials.

The provincial regulatory offence that Hooda pleaded to is unlikely to result in any immigration consequences. Allardyce said Hooda, who is expected to graduate from a computer science program later this year, hopes to remain in Canada and continue to work.

“I think you’ve learned your lesson,” Devine told Hooda.

 

 

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca