7 December 2007
Maputo — A customs tribunal in the northern Mozambican port of Nacala has ordered the return to their owners of 543 containers full of wood that were seized before they could be illegally exported to China, reports Friday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".
But the companies involved must pay fines of over 13.5 million meticais (about 556,000 US dollars) before they can recover the containers.
As usual with Mozambican courts, the customs tribunal made no public announcement of its decision, and reporters only found out about it at third hand from Regina Quinhentos, the legal advisor of the Nampula Provincial Directorate of Agriculture.
Quinhentos said "data we have received from the northern regional division of the Mozambican Tax Authority indicate that the Customs Tribunal ordered that the eight offending companies, all of Chinese origin, must pay fines of 13,503,240 meticais".
Once the Chinese companies had paid, they could go through the normal procedures they had previously evaded to export their wood.
But 210 of the containers are carrying logs of precious hardwood species that cannot be exported unprocessed. This ban has been in place since June.
"Noticias" notes that the other 323 containers are full of supposedly sawn wood. With this minimum processing the wood can be exported - but obviously the customs service will have to check each and every container to ensure that it really does contain sawn woods and not logs.
The containers were seized in September when inspection teams, including staff from customs, the police, the Nacala destruct government, and the provincial forestry services, became suspicious that certain members of the Nacala district economic services, in connivance with some customs officials, were facilitating the illegal export of precious hardwood logs.
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