Articles

Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) took another decision regarding customs valuation and adjustment of transaction value. In this decision CJEU analysed legal importance of compensation … paid for the right to exclusively distribute goods. CJEU concluded that such compensation was the condition of sale and thus must be reflected in the customs value of goods. The fact that compensation was agreed on in a separate contract (not in a sale-purchase agreement) and that it was limited in time did not change conclusions of the CJEU. It is yet another signal for the importers to carefully examine all the payments between them and the seller and evaluate their possible influence on customs value of imported goods.

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union has answered the question of whether goods made partly of tobacco and other materials should be subject to excise duty on tobacco in … its entirety or only in part of the composition of the tobacco as one of the consisting substances.

The goal of the EU law on customs valuation is to introduce a fair, uniform, and neutral system excluding the use of arbitrary or fictitious customs values. The customs value must therefore reflect … the real economic value of an imported product and take into account all of the elements of that product that have economic value. In this article we are going to review how the Bulgarian courts apply the provisions related to customs valuation, more specifically, to the inclusion of royalties in the customs value of the goods.

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?