Andrzej Domański, the Polish Finance Minister, said he was “very confident” that the EU Council would reach an agreement on customs reform next week, at the press conference following the Ecofin Council in Luxembourg on Friday 20 June (see EUROPE 13661/27). The ministers welcomed the compromise proposed by the Polish Presidency, and came out in favour of introducing handling fees, i.e. abolishing the exemption from customs duties for parcels worth less than €150.
Mr Domański considered that the text was at the “fine-tuning” stage. “I believe that we are really close to this very important decision which is, I believe, also crucial for bringing competitiveness back to Europe”, he said. “We know that we have this challenge of some unfair competition that European companies have to face”. During the public debate, the ministers unanimously expressed their desire to move the issue forward.
“We take good note of the Council’s proposal for additional measures, in particular with respect of imports of goods directly shipped to consumers”, said the European Commissioner for the Economy, Valdis Dombrovskis. In its communication on e-commerce, the Commission proposed applying a handling fee to these parcels, which is intended to externalise the cost of their customs supervision (see EUROPE 13572/5). “The discussion on beneficiaries will continue during the trilogues”, he added.
Ministers see it as a budgetary resource, but opinions differ as to how it should be perceived. On the one hand, the Italian, Belgian, Greek and Finnish ministers said that this money could be added to the EU budget while work continues on new own resources (see EUROPE 13660/17). “With regards to tariffs, the policy that we have been following for years is 75% going to the EU budget and 25% going as a processing fee to the Member states. Obviously, this is not a tariff. We cannot use exactly the same analysis, but we do acknowledge the fact that some of those resources need to go to the Commission’s budget”, explained the Greek Kyriakos Pierrakaki.
On the other hand, France’s Éric Lombard said he was delighted to see that the text enshrines the responsibility of online sellers, reserves the simplifications mainly for e-commerce operators considered to be reliable, and enshrines the principle of processing fees. “In this respect, revenue from management fees should strengthen the resources of national customs”, he said. Hungary and Sweden, for their part, would like these costs to be allocated to the Member States, as they bear “a significant burden related to these activities”, explained Hungary’s Márton Nagy.
Finally, Estonian MEP Jürgen Ligi entered a parliamentary reservation on the grounds that the proposal was too recent. “We have not been able to carry out the domestic procedures that are required from us in order to agree with it”, he argued. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)