Baltic Master case in the CJEU: once again about related persons and the use of customs valuation IS

Customs Compliance & Risk Management, Issue 15, June / July 2022
Monika Bielskienė
Monika Bielskienė
Attorney at Law, Senior Manager at PwC Lithuania, and Candidate PhD at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
Published 31 Jul 2022
Baltic Master case in the CJEU: once again about related persons and the use of customs valuation IS

Photo by Gritt Zheng on Unsplash

Case law
valuation
On 13.06.2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a decision in the Baltic Master case (C-599/20) on two relatively unrelated issues. The first, whether customs must establish an objective legal relationship between the buyer and the seller in order to consider them as related persons. The second, whether customs can rely on the value of a single comparable transaction found on the national customs valuation information system (IS), denying the acceptance of the declared value of the goods (air conditioning units). In this article, we discuss interpretations provided by the CJEU; and we look forward for the national verdict of the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania (SACL).