Case of more than 100 tons of herbal “disguised” as agricultural products: effective struggle with key products

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The first container of infringing goods is searched.

Talking to reporters from Customs News, the leader of the Anti-Smuggling Investigation Department said that the newly discovered incident at Da Nang port was a typical case showing the active and drastic action in the fight against smuggling of pharmaceutical materials and high-risk commodity groups under the direction of the General Department of Customs.

Through the plan on anti-smuggling control in 2020 and many thematic and cross-cutting plans, the General Department of Customs' leadership clearly indicated that focus on controlling key products, especially those directed bythe Prime Minister are strictly controlled.

Leaders of the Department of Anti-smuggling Investigation said herbs are materials used as medicines, directly affecting human health. Therefore, if raw materials that do not meet the imported standards are used as medicines, it will affect the health of the community, not only with immediate negative impacts but also genetic risks.

Therefore, according to the Pharmaceutical Law and the guiding documents, the import and production of pharmaceutical materials must be registered with the competent authorities to be licensed before operation. In particular, all imported pharmaceuticals must go through strict inspection and be carried out through international border gates.

With such strict import standards and conditions, there is a situation where enterprises seek to intentionally disguise or cheat customs declarations in order to evade functional forces andfind ways to bring medicinal herbs inland. In fact, in 2019 and previous years, the Customs forces of the provinces with the Northern border and some localities have discovered a number of cases of medicinal herbs "disguised" as agricultural products for import.

In the case of more than 100 tons of herbal medicine "disguised" asagricultural products, which was discovered in Da Nang on June 24, updated with reporters and leaders of the Central Region Anti-smuggling Control Team - Team 2 (Anti-Smuggling Investigation Department, General Department of Customs) said that the unit is still coordinating with functional units to search and classify violated cargo containers.

"Because the cargo in the shipment is very large, it is expected to take 10 days for the Customs agency to search all five containers in the violating shipment," the leader of Team 2 said.

Earlier, on June 14, N.S Import Export Trading Co., Ltd. (located in Hai Duong province) opened the import declaration of the above shipment at the Da Nang Port Border Gate Customs Branch. According to the declaration, the goods include: "unprocessed, dried apple, apricot, cashew, radish, carrots", used as food for boiling water, not yet soaked in water, new goods 100%, not in CITES.

This shipment is contained in five containers shipped onboard INSPIR, shipment 20003S from HangPu port (China) to TienSa port (Da Nang) on ​​June 14, 2020.

However, through the analysis of professional information before the goods arrived at the port, combined with the baseline information, the customs office determined that the goods infive containers were in fact medicinal materials. Considering this was a trick of the business in order to evade the control of the authorities, Team 2 reported to the leader of the Anti-Smuggling Investigation Department proposing to coordinate with the border gate Customs Sub-Department.

Da Nang port verifies information and conducts a cross check of actual cargo imported with the declaration to clarify the violations of the business. In fact, the initial inspection revealed that many herbal products were not included in the declaration.

The case is being further verified and clarified.