By Caroline Brothers
PARIS, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Counterfeit CDs, mobile phones and toys cost the French economy about six billion euros ($7.5 billion) a year and fund networks of organised crime, France said on Tuesday, launching a campaign to warn consumers.
France is particularly vulnerable to industrial piracy given its high concentration of consumer brands. It says counterfeits also cost jobs and carry safety risks.
On Monday the country's National Anti-Counterfeiting Committee (CNAC), the Union of Manufacturers and the government will launch a 400,000 euro week-long campaign to warn consumers against buying illicit goods.
Email addresses will be bombarded with messages and French cities plastered with posters reading: "Organised crime is counting on you". The campaign argues that counterfeiters exploit people, launder money, and finance terrorism and crime.
France treats buying fake objects as the crime of receiving stolen goods, and is toughening penalties for counterfeit gangs as part of a bill that goes to a second reading in parliament this week.
"Collusion between counterfeit networks and mafia or even terrorist milieux is proven," French Industry Minister Nicole Fontaine told a news conference to announce the campaign on Tuesday. "Counterfeiting is a social and economic offence at the heart of international crime."
CNAC Chairman Francois d'Aubert said consumers pleased to have acquired a motorbike, an electrical appliance or a toy at a fraction of the normal price may be putting themselves at risk. "Counterfeiters are peddlers of illusions: they sell timebombs without a thought for the explosion date," he said.
That is because counterfeit toys may be inflammable, fake car parts are unlikely to meet safety norms, medicines will lack quality controls, and CDs will have a short life-span.
Counterfeit goods account for 5.0 percent of global trade, and may reach 9.0 percent this year, Fontaine said. She estimated their total worth at 200-300 billion euros per year.
French fashion brands like Hermes , Louis Vuitton and Lacoste, Moulinex in home appliances, car parts manufacturer Valeo and industrial gas maker Air Liquide are all concerned by the traffic of fakes.
Bankrupt appliance maker Moulinex was "a typical case of a business killed by counterfeiting", d'Aubert said. France's Seb now owns its main assets.
D'Aubert added the links between counterfeiting and organised crime had been demonstrated as widely as Russia, Albania, China, Japan and Italy.
The counterfeit trade is lucrative, he explained: a kilo of illegal CDs bring in "three times as much as a kilo of hashish".