May 07th 2015 Customs house enforcing cargo quantity determination by draft survey for all vessels
Date: 07/05/2015
Customs House has advised that the Customs draft survey will be carried out to ALL vessels in an export permit to export permit basis (some vessels have several export permits), effective today.
This measure will translate into high operational costs to shippers and serious delays to operations. Each survey takes around 2 hours to be carried out and therefore, we could be facing around 10 hours of delays to loading operations in some cases where the cargo is covered by several customs export permits. Also, due to the physical limitations of the method, only one cargo will be able to be loaded at a time.
The Customs house has not confirmed yet whether this method will be implemented as the method to assess the loaded weights or only as a counter check to the shore scale figures. They have not advised for how long the measure will be held either.