Union acts on fake ACP goods

Date: 03/06/04

EUROPEAN Commission customs chiefs are warning some of the Union's poorest trading partners to stop companies from other countries using their ports as a staging-post for low-duty exports into the Union.

The EU currently offers the 78-nation Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries preferential trade terms for their exports into the Union.

However, officials are concerned that this system is being abused and that products from richer countries, where duties are far higher, are routinely entering via the ACP states to avoid higher duties.

Experts say the EU executive has written to many of the countries to complain that goods, such as canned tuna from the Far East, has often been spotted at European ports being passed off as ACP produce.

But European Voice has learned that the complaints have been ignored and the practice continues.

In most cases few efforts are made to conceal the real origin of the goods - with many imports still labelled in their original oriental languages.

Robert Verrue, the Commission's director-general for taxation and customs policy, is expected to tell the ACP countries at a meeting tomorrow (4 June) that enough is enough.

He will inform the officials at the EU-ACP customs cooperation committee that the Commission plans to take firmer action in future.

"The meeting will discuss cases where the rules of origin are abused so as to try and crack down on cases where products are described as being eligible for preferential tariff treatment, when they are not," said Jonathan Todd, the Commission's customs policy spokesman.

Todd confirmed that tuna is one of the products in question - but officials refused to give other examples, insisting that they wanted to avoid a "finger- pointing exercise".

The Commission has battled for years against abuses of its country of origin rules.

In the late 1990s, officials thwarted a massive trade in aluminium, which was being rerouted into the EU via duty-free countries with no domestic production of their own.

European Commission customs officials are concerned that the preferential trade terms for exports into the EU from the ACP group of countries are being abused and that products from richer countries are routinely entering via the ACP states to avoid paying higher duties.