Brussels, 25/07/2000 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has decided to boost controls on imports of bananas to counter fraudulent operations detected by OLAF in cooperation with its agricultural services. The rules adopted on Tuesday establish more detailed provisions on the use of import certificates so as to guarantee proper application of tariff quota arrangements. They foresee, inter alia, systematic follow-up and monitoring of the authenticity of these certificates on the basis of cross-checks between the documents issued and those actually used.
"This decision demonstrates the Commission's continued effort to make our market organisation fraud-proof", commented the Commissioner responsible for the common agriculture policy, Franz Fischler. More specifically, the new regulation establishes that: i) customs authorities will keep a copy of licences or licence extracts and forward them every two weeks to the authorities that issued them; ii) the authenticity and conformity of these documents will be controlled by the issuing authorities; iii) in case of doubt about authenticity at the time of presentation for release into free circulation, customs authorities must follow a determined procedure; iii) the Commission will transmit to customs authorities a list of operators registered in the framework of import arrangements for bananas.
It will be recalled that on 9 June last, investigators from the European anti-fraud office (OLAF) inspected, with the Catania (Italy) Finance Guard, a vessel carrying around 4,000 tonnes of bananas earmarked for import to the Community market. When checks were conducted, the documents that would have provided entitlement to import under preferential conditions proved to be false. This discovery led OLAF to extend its investigation, in cooperation with the Agriculture Directorate General of the European Commission, national administrations and the private sector. The result was convincing: no fewer than 101 false import certificates had been presented since March 1998 for the fraudulent import of more than 160,000 tonnes of bananas from Ecuador, circumventing import duties worth an estimated 126 million euros.