Ilyashev & Partners Law Firm has successfully represented the Druzhkovkа Hardware Plant in its demand that the Donetsk Customs Office of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine reimburse it for duties wrongfully collected that reached Ukraine's Supreme Court.
According to Ilyashev & Partners, "customs authorities had wrongfully interpreted a decision of the Interdepartmental Commission on International Trade on the application of n anti-dumping duty based solely on the UTKZED code and the country of origin, without taking the goods’ description into account." Specifically, the firm reported, "according to a decision of the Interdepartmental Commission on International Trade, the anti-dumping duty applied to imports of reinforcement steel and rolled steel that fall within the appropriate goods’ description. However, the Donetsk Customs Office of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine insisted on payment of anti-dumping duty similarly for bar iron, which belongs neither to reinforcement nor to rolled steel by its description, but is classified under the same UTKZED codes as these."
According to Ilyashev & Partners, "following numerous addresses seeking clarifications to the State Fiscal Service by Druzhkovka Hardware Plant PrJSC, Ukraine’s leading metalware manufacturer, the fiscal authorities acknowledged that they had been acting wrongfully. However, the customs office rejected reimbursing the amounts of anti-dumping duty, charged and paid by the enterprise over the course of 2018-2019 pertinent to the supplies of raw materials, i.e., bar iron for manufacturing metalware products." The firm challenged the customs authority's actions in court.
On March 18, 2021, Ilyashev & Partners reports, the Supreme Court awarded a final and binding judgement for the benefit of Druzhkovkа Hardware Plant. According to the firm, "the court judgement has now been enforced and the funds have been reimbursed to the plant in their entirety."
“This is one of the first cases [in which] an enterprise proved as a matter of court litigation procedures that an anti-dumping duty was payable based on the goods’ description rather than on the UTKZED code," explained Ilyashev & Partners Partner Olena Omelchenko. "The court came to the conclusion that the customs office’s resolution to insist on paying anti-dumping duty had been adopted in excess of powers and in breach of the procedure, set out in currently applicable laws."
The Ilyashev & Partners team was supervised by Partner Olena Omelchenko and Head of the firm's Kharkiv Office, Andriy Lytvyn.
