Report: Company Accused of Falsifying Import Licenses in Vietnam
A company based in Vietnam was accused by the country’s customs department's anti-smuggling unit of falsifying import permits and smuggling medical products, the Vietnam Customs Department's CustomsNews website said in an April 15 report. The company, C.V.S One Member Limited Liability Company, allegedly “heavily modified” import permits in at least 18 customs declarations between 2009 and 2016, including changing the model, term and number of the item in the permit’s appendix. The company’s “director ... admitted to falsifying import licenses,” the report said, and the investigation has been handed to Vietnamese police.
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According to the report, the Dong Nai Customs Department became suspicious of the company’s imports during a post-clearance inspection of the documents, and Vietnam Customs eventually found that four sets of the customs dossiers did not have original import permits, two customs dossiers did not have “import permits as prescribed,” and that there were “differences” in import licenses for 18 other customs declarations. The report said some licenses were “modified many times to suit each quantity of imported goods.”
A company director falsified the licenses by “adding items not in the original license issued by the Ministry of Health; or modifying the original date, month, and year of the original expired license,” the report said. The company then “opened 18 customs declarations” for a range of medical-related imports worth about $64 million, including: “arterial opening devices, central venous catheters, liver biopsies, lungs, bones, diagnostic catheters, heart valves,” the report said. In an explanation letter to Vietnam Customs, the director, who admitted to the license falsifying, said the Ministry of Health's licensing procedure “takes a long time” and the medical equipment was needed to “quickly” cure patients, according to the report. The director said he was not smuggling, and justified the changes, saying it was “necessary to modify the license to keep up with the delivery schedule for hospitals and serve patients and companies,” the report said.