Commercial law

Commercial law is all about trade, how it is financed, which key documents are needed eg bill of lading, mates receipt, where the duty of the carriers end and when they start, customs law and much more.

When just focusing on the customs duties and leaving the rest apart..

Three elements to calculate customs duties need to be considered.

1. How a product is classified is going to determine its duty rate?

2. The origin of the product (is there a free trade agreement or not?) For example, is the origin Chinese EU, US etc.

3. Monetary value of the Goods.

The World Trade Organization (The WTO) Geneva

• The body decides on regularizing customs law, also investment law.

• Purchase price is the basis of customs value

• You can only have a standard duty rate (you cannot say that 10% for china and 20% for India)

WTO does not have direct effect in the EU recourse. EU must establish legislation that complies with the duty rates. What happens if EU does not change its legislation? The other countries, for example Taiwan or US can impose higher duty rates as a form of retaliation.

WCO (World customs organization) Brussels

• Harmonised system (Customs Tariff)

• Safe Framework of Standards (AEO)

• Technical assistance

EU Customs Law

There exist directives and regulations

EU has exclusive power when it comes to customs trade.

Customs Union: One customs are with common outside borders yet with common internal borders.

Custom duties are collected by the MS authorities. These are the revenues and fall within each MS themselves and does not go to the EU.

So a typical case could look like this

• Kwei Tek Chao v British Traders and Shippers Ltd, that a disposal of the b/l (which is part of the shipping documents) is not necessarily an act inconsistent with the seller's ownership of the goods and that, in principle, a CIF buyer does not lose his right to reject the goods by dealings with forged documents, e.g. by pledging the b/l to a bank

  • In that case, the question whether by dealing with the documents the buyers had done an act inconsistent with the sellers' ownership in the goods did not arise, but in the interest of "those who may be concerned" Devlin J. observed that so long as a buyer was merely dealing with the documents, he did not commit an act inconsistent with the seller's ownership in the goods and retained the right of rejecting the goods if upon examination after their arrival they were found not to be in conformity with the contract

  • The argument that the buyer, when reselling the b/l or pledging it to a bank, intended to give the sub-purchaser or pledgee a proprietary interest in the goods and passed title to him, was rejected by Devlin J. on the grounds that the buyer himself had only conditional property, viz property conditional on the goods being in accordance with the contract and that therefore he could not deal with more than conditional property