Epress.am News from Armenia
Wednesday morning employees of “Zvartnots” customs house refused for a long time to give Val Automation LLC Director, engineer-entrepreneur Vardges Gaspari a receipt of his application; they demanded that Gaspari remove the following sentence from the letter: “I am not going to appeal the decision since your superiors, namely [RA Finance Minister] Gagik Khachatryan, [RA Prime Minister] Hovik Abrahamyan, and [RA President] Serzh Sargsyan are even bigger despicable bastards. I will also not appeal to the court as there is no such thing as a court [in Armenia].”
In an interview with Epress.am Gaspari said he refused to make changes in his application, and to protest the actions of the customs employees, he lay down for about half an hour at the door of “Zvartnots” customs house chief Vladimir Tamrazyan's office.
In his application Gaspari stated that if today, September 9, his crane remote control imported from Taiwan did not go through customs clearance then there would be no further necessity for it. The entrepreneur's goods arrived from Taiwan in 3 days; however, Gaspari has been unable to clear it through customs for about 10 days because of documentation problems.
The idea of providing a receipt was so undesirable to the customs employees, Gaspari stated, that “they were willing to perform customs formalities right then and there,” that is, to eliminate the need for an application.
“I said that even though I am suffering significant financial losses, but my civic position is more important to me, and in any case the customs house has to sign the receipt. I told them 'You're not Serzh's lawyer [sic]: he can go to court if he wishes to. You receive salaries from my taxes,” Gaspari stated. The entrepreneur added that he was given the receipt only after he refused to end his protest action and contacted media.
As previously reported, Gaspari has been facing serious obstacles at the customs house, as well as the National Security Service related to customs clearance of goods imported from Taiwan: Gaspari intends to export the remote control to Georgia. However, the customs office and the NSS, citing a number of laws and procedures, refuse to allow Gaspari's goods to go through customs clearance.
“I also realized that customs officers do not know the laws. They don't know them as they don't need them. There are two kinds of importers – oligarchs' businesses which are constant and where customs officers will write anything they are told to. The second group are people who have some kind of business here and are willing to pay a little [bribe] to speed up [the clearance process]. For 10 days my item remained at the customs house, and my future collaboration is now at risk. My [Georgian] partners will now say 'Why do we even need to work with a citizen of this country?'” Gaspari concluded.