Gill Nadel, Adv.
The District Court of Haifa recently (2.8.07) partially accepted the stance of the Customs Authority regarding the invalidation of a certificate of origin. (תא 960/02, importer represented by Adv Ro'i feller and others, and customs- Attorney for Central Haifa).
The case involved investigations done by the Israeli and Italian Customs regarding the validity of certificates of origin. According to customs, the goods did not deserve the status of European origin and exemption from customs and accordingly it issued a retroactive notice of debt to the importer for a sum of over a million NIS.
The importer claimed that the certificates of origin were not invalid, and at the very least- that customs did not present acceptable proof of the invalidity of the certificates. The importer further claimed that it had proven that the origin of the merchandise was in Italy. Additionally, the importer claimed that the sum of the debt in the deduction notice was mistaken, since customs had invalidated directories that were accompanied by valid certificates of origin, certificates that were not checked and not invalidated by the Italian Customs Authority.
The Court accepted the stance of the importer on the last point and rejected the rest of its claims.
The court preformed a comparison of the certificates of origin that were invalidated by the authorities in Italy and those directories that were invalidated by customs and found that they did not match. The court even noted that customs, in its arguments before court, did not mention this point, and accordingly the court canceled the notices of deduction that related to those directories.
On the other hand, the court ruled that the Customs Authority in Italy invalidated the certificates. While the letters from the Italian customs did not include a formal declaration with the formulation “We hereby invalidate these moving certificates”, it was clear from them that the Italian customs negated the validity of the certificates.
Regarding the claim that the importer raised that the letters from the Italian customs were not admissible proofs, the court affirms that it is clearly a case of hearsay that is not in and of itself admissible, but they are sufficient to create an administrative proof on which the Israeli Customs could base its decision.
The court further ruled that the importer did not succeed in refuting the suspicions regarding the origin of the merchandise. The court expressed amazement, inter alia, that the importer did not bring positive proof that the origin of the merchandise was Italy, and that the explanations of the importer did not fit with economic and commercial logic
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