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Thijs van Luijt

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On 17 May 2023, the European Commission (the “Commission”) published a set of proposals that, according to the Commission, constitute the “most ambitious and comprehensive reform of the EU Customs Union since its establishment in 1968.” Please find our previous blogpost in which we anticipated the proposal here. The proposals now published aim to: Increase duty revenue; Avoid illicit and non-compliant products; Align the current customs framework with the current e-commerce landscape; and Uniformize the…

Introduction of an EU Customs Agency is becoming more and more tangible. This idea of a “European Customs Agency” was first proposed on 31 March 2022 by the “Wise Persons Group on Challenges Facing the Customs Union”. More recently, on 28 February 2023, during the 62nd Plenary Meeting of the Trade Contact Group set up by the European Commission, the creation of an EU Customs Authority was once again discussed alongside the introduction of an…

On 10 May 2023 the Council of the European Union and European Parliament signed the regulation implementing the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (“CBAM”). CBAM will enter into force twenty days after it is published in the Official Journal of the European Union. Below we will provide further detail on the regulation and highlight some aspects that have been amended when compared to the initial proposal. The new CBAM Regulation is targeted at imports of products…

Imports of products in carbon-intensive industries outside the EU will soon be regulated by the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism On 13 December 2022, a provisional agreement has been reached between the EU Council and the European Parliament on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (“CBAM”). This mechanism will be set up to align the price of carbon for EU products covered by the EU Emission Trading Scheme (“ETS”) with the price of carbon for imported goods…

On June 9, 2022, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued its decision in case C-599/20 (Baltic Master UAB). This case provides more clarity on the concept of related persons, which allows customs authorities to disregard the transactions value and instead use different valuation methods to determine the customs value of imported goods. EU customs law provides for an exhaustive list in determining when (legal) persons are related and in which situations customs authorities can…

New Intrastat requirements will enter into force as of January 2022. Intrastat is the EU’s system to track the movement of goods between countries of the EU. Authorities use the statistical data on international trade obtained with Intrastat for example when negotiating trade agreements and to monitoring of the functioning of the internal market. Specifically the new rules include two additional data points in the monthly reporting format: (i) The country of origin of the…