The customs department will from November 1 introduce a new €2 processing fee for all goods arriving in Cyprus from outside the European single market, department spokesman George Constantinou said on Wednesday.
“This is not an additional duty. It is a fee for processing customs controls, which results from the broader customs reform taking place in the European Union and the adoption of the new union customs code,” he told the Cyprus News Agency.
He explained that the new fee will go hand-in-hand with the European Union’s €3 temporary customs duty on what it described as “low-value parcels” with a value of up to €150 entering Europe from outside the single market, but that the new €2 fee will apply to all parcels entering from outside the single market, regardless of value.
This, he said, is because the EU’s new customs regime requires “additional working hours, possibly additional personnel, and specialised equipment, both for the identification of dangerous products and for the analysis of the data entered into the department’s electronic import systems”.
He also said that following the introduction of the €3 duty on July 1, the number of parcels arriving in Cyprus from outside the single market has fallen by between 30 and 35 per cent, but that the number of items sent in any given parcel has increased.
Previously, he said, parcels generally contained one or two items, but now, they contain four or five.
“So, in terms of the number of items, we are approximately at the same level as we had before the imposition of the measure,” he said.
New duty raises over €1m per month
Regarding the amount raised by the new duty, he said that between €1 million and €1.5 million per month is collected, but that of that figure, around 75 per cent is “returned to the European Union”.
When the duty had been introduced in July, the European Commission explained that “every day, millions of low-value parcels enter the EU” and that “many contain products which do not meet EU safety standards or are undervalued or falsely declared to avoid customs duties”.
“At the same time, the current customs duty exemption gives non-EU sellers an unfair advantage over businesses that manufacture or sell products in the EU,” it said.
As such, it added, “the new measure will help create fairer competition for EU businesses, better protect consumers from unsafe products, tackle customs fraud, and address environmental concerns over mass shipping”.