The European Anti-Fraud Office has discovered a network of companies that fraudulently imported Chinese tube and pipe fittings via several Asian countries to evade high EU customs duties.
The discovery led to the recovery of 9 million euros (US$11.8 million) in customs duties — 6.5 million euros of which were related to imports from Taiwan and India — and it was the result of investigations carried out in cooperation with Indian and Taiwanese customs, according to a statement released by the office on Thursday.
NOT MADE IN JAPAN
In the investigation, a shipment of tube and pipe fittings claimed to be made in Japan was found to have been loaded in the Chinese port of Dalian and then routed via Japan to the EU, the office said.
That led to the detection of further fraudulent imports into the EU from India and Taiwan with false commercial documentation of origin, the office added.
Also, a Taiwanese exporting producer of tube and pipe fittings was found to have channeled the Chinese products into the EU market. Taiwanese authorities requested that the company pay approximately 1.8 million euros to cover the import duties, plus a fine for breaching the country’s customs laws, the office said.
In 1996, the EU imposed an anti-dumping duty rate of 58.6 percent on certain Chinese tube and pipe iron and steel fittings. The duty was later extended to include imports from Taiwan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines as a result of circumvention.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained