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The circular of the FTS (Russian Federal Customs Agency) Central Customs Department dated 3 July 2009 No. 67-14/16589 On Strengthening of Control over the Import of Fruit and Vegetable Products specifies the following.

For the purposes of carrying out the functions of customs authorities with respect to securing the observance of the restrictions established pursuant to the legislation of the Russian federation for regulation of foreign trade activities and elimination of breaches of the procedures of customs clearance of importing fruit and vegetable products the Department considers necessary to make known to the subordinated customs authorities the following.

In the event of detecting when performing the customs clearance of the importing fruit and vegetable products (when checking the customs declaration and other documents presented to the customs authority), of circumstances that don’t permit to perform the necessary operations to establish the conformity of the goods with the information thereof (as per their description, origin, manufacturer, and the like) as well as if the customs officials have reasonable doubts as to the safety of the declaring goods it is advisable to be governed by articles 77, 385, and 411 of the Customs Code of the Russian Federation in accordance with which the customs authorities are entitled to call specialists of controlling agencies to provide assistance in carrying out the customs control.

It is advisable to pay particular attention to the cases where for customs clearance of the fruit and vegetable products the sanitary and epidemiological certificates are presented the “Manufacturing organization” box of which specifies not a specific company (organization) manufactured the products, and the country of origin, but the supplying company carrying out the packaging, marking, and selling of the products having origin from various countries while there is no information on direct manufacturers of the products and countries where they were grown up. Furthermore, the information on the marking made on the goods (packages), declared in box 31 of the cargo customs declaration and specified in the certificates of customs inspection / examination (as the case may be) is of great importance in such cases.