Tax Officials Discover Under-Valued Imports

The Mozambican Tax Authority (AT) announced on Monday that in the last week of March it discovered two major attempts by importers to under-invoice goods that arrived at Maputo port.

In one case, the wholesale company Armazens Golam Issa declared that the merchandise imported was worth 25,785 US dollars. Together with the inspection company Intertek Testing Services (ITS), tax offcials inspected the consignment and revalued it at 39,050 dollars.

The second case concerned goods imported by the company Xinlong which gave the value as 9,899 dollars. The tax inspection put the true value at more than three times that sum – 33,331 dollars.

From these two inspections alone, the AT recovered for the Mozambican exchequer 561,250 meticais (19,973 dollars, at current exchange rates).

The AT also reported the seizure of a truck carrying 2.075 boxes full of soup packets. Since the driver had no import documents at all, it was presumed that the goods had entered the country illegally. The total amount owing on these smuggled goods, in duties and fines, is 411,348 meticais (about 14,640 dollars).

The AT seized 1,020 boxes of cigarettes belonging to the company Euro Trade. The company had declared these as goods in transit from Zimbabwe to Swaziland, but the AT believed the real intention was to sell them in Mozambique.

Another seizure of smuggled cigarettes occurred in the northern port of Nacala, where tax officials discovered that a container which the company Azfal Trading had said was full of bicycles, in fact contained 1,046 boxes of cigarettes

Source: Club of Mozambique