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GDC and Hai Phong Police have released three decisions on taking legal proceedings against the Duc Dat Trade Service & Import/export Company for ‘illegally transporting goods across borders’.
Prior to that, in December 2017, agencies discovered that the certificate on scrap imports meeting standards to be eligible for import, and other documents, had been forged.
Duc Dat no longer operates at the address it had registered with local authorities, and Nguyen Duc Truong, director of the company, is not living in the locality.
In early March 2018, the Sai Gon Port Customs Agency, when examining two containers of scrap imported by CEM Mold Manufacturing JSC, discovered that the imports were used electronic boards.
CEM is a familiar name to customs agencies. Prior to that, in 2016 and 2017, the HCMC Customs Agency discovered prohibited products in CEM’s 16 containers of scrap imports. All the electronic waste was from the US.
| Some enterprises had several repeated offences in importing prohibited scrap, but they only had to pay a fine of between tens and hundreds of million of dong, small amount of money compared with the profit they could expect if imports had not been discovered. |
In the customs declaration, CEM said the importers were copper scrap.
However, the People’s Procuracy stated that CEM did not violate Article 188 and Article 189 of the Penal Code, and therefore, there was no basis to prosecute the company.
The decision disappointed customs officers, who could not understand why a company, which had many violations, was not subject to legal proceedings.
A senior officer said it was unreasonable to set such a slight sanction on such a big violator, emphasizing that current fines were not severe enough to deter violators.
HCMC customs agencies have suffered headaches because of thousands of containers of prohibited scrap imports.
Tien Phong on July 30 quoted its sources as reporting that 3,200 containers of scrap imports were stuck at Cat Lai Port in HCMC and 2,000 containers at Cai Mep in Ba Ria – Vung Tau.
The owners of the containers have not turned up to make customs declarations. At Hai Phong Port, 1,485 containers remained uncleared by July 5, including 1,342 containers of plastics scrap.
Reporters found that all the uncleared containers at Cat Lai were imported in 2017 and the first months of 2018.
A GDC report showed that the scrap imports in 2017 was twice as much as the imports in 2016. Steel, iron, plastics and paper scrap imports saw the import amount increasing sharply by 200-400 percent compared with total imports in 2016.
In the first five months of 2018, plastics scrap imports soared by 200 percent over 2017.
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