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Bahrain Customs Affairs (BCA) is constantly developing its systems and infrastructure to support and improve Customs operations, thereby helping to build a safe, advanced, investment-friendly … business environment in the Kingdom. Bahrain, an active Member of the WCO, regularly examines the standards, recommendations and tools developed by the Organization and wishes to act as a leader to the Customs community by demonstrating excellence and creativity in Customs practices.

A customs warehouse stored bottled alcohol (vodka). Customs audited the warehouse, took a sample, and found that there was water instead of vodka in the bottles! Customs ordered the warehouse … to pay €308,455 customs debt (import duties and taxes, fines and interest). A dispute arose regarding who must pay the customs debt, as the customs warehouse is not obliged to take samples of the goods. Let's look at the clarification of the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania (SACL) in this case.

What happens if the goods placed under customs supervision are stolen? Is that circumstance to be regarded as relieving the person in charge of the goods from related tax obligations arising … from the release for free circulation? May the national legislation of an EU Member State impose a pecuniary penalty, which equals to the amount of import duties or some other amount? Or may be both imposed – the payment of duties and the pecuniary penalty?

The courts of Lithuania dealt recently with several cases of administrative liability of employees at customs and temporary storage warehouses. Various issues were identified during customs audits: … storage of goods not covered by a customs authorisation, storage of goods at a place not authorised by customs, unloading of goods without customs permit. Let's look at the circumstances that led to the issues, the sanctions imposed on the responsible persons and some of the arguments presented by the parties to the court.