The client of our company has assumed obligations for the transit transportation of goods in a container from Estonia to Kazakhstan through the territory of Russia. When removing goods from the territory of Russia, a customs inspection was carried out, a discrepancy was found between the declared and actually transported goods in a sealed container. An administrative case was initiated against the carrier under Part 1 of Article 16.2 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation for failure to declare goods, the protocol was submitted for consideration to the Dzerzhinsky District Court of Orenburg.
We did not agree with the qualification of the offense proposed by the customs authority, since Part 3 of Article 16.1 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation establishes a more specific description of the committed offense – inaccurate declaration as the communication of unreliable information about the declared goods. Moreover, the sanction of Part 1 of Article 16.2 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation provided for liability in the form of a fine of up to double the value of the goods (which threatened our client with multimillion-dollar losses), while the sanction of Part 3 of Article 16.1 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation established a softer liability (a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 rubles). During the administrative investigation, we petitioned the customs authority to reclassify the violation, but the customs office rejected the petition.
The court agreed with our legal position that when two administrative compositions compete, the one that more specifically describes the essence of the violation should be preferred. Since the actions of the carrier, although they led to the non-declaration of the actually transported goods, but they were committed through the indication of unreliable information about the goods, the court decided to qualify the violation under Part 3 of Article 16.1 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation with the imposition of a fine close to the minimum of 51,000 rubles.
