Peter wrote:
Fortunately the UK has a general defence of due diligence The above would not work, because to require a pilot to obtain a preflight briefing from a tax office is ridiculous.
So if I find a Banker that tells me that a certain income from an investment in the UK is tax exempt, HRMC would say “ok, then you obviously demonstrated due diligence and we do not collect taxes” ?!? I’ll get rich!
That is exactly what happened in this case:
In no jurisdiction I know would these events lead to the fact that the tax authorities would exempt you from paying the applicable taxes/customs. In many cases they might waive any additional fines for the attempted tax fraud on top of the due taxes – and this is exactly what happened in this case.
A complication that is also not exclusive to Germany is, that many actions that lead to a tax/duty are not reversible. The pilot couldn’t say “I expected that I don’t have to pay customs but now that I know I take the plane back to Switzerland and don’t have to pay the tax”.
This is aviation, and not general taxation.
In aviation, there are certain practices which are long-established.
In business aviation, for example, it is normal to email the handling company and if they say Yes, you go.
But, fair enough, this (and the acceptance of it among some pilots as reasonable) illustrates the different cultures within what we call “Europe” 
The objectionable element of this case is not that there was a mistake and that there is punishment, but that the punishment is hugely disproportionate to the level of culpability.
When I made nearly exactly the same mistake (relying on a Flugleiter assuring me that I could fly directly to their field from the UK) the result was a letter ’don’t do it again’, and even if I had been fined it would have been a few hundred Euros.
If this had been a criminal case, and assuming an income of say 3,000 Euro per month as a pensioner, the 30,000 ‘fine’ would be 300x daily net income, which is the equivalent of 9.5 month’s imprisonment if not paid – a ridiculous level.
Customs using draconian powers just because the letter of the law allows them to is not unique to Germany, though – in the UK customs used their right to confiscate cars (thousands) when used to ‘smuggle’ minor quantities, and finally lost because this was ‘unlawful and disproportionate’.
A problem I see is the casual way this is treated in many cases by customs and immigration with such major risks at play. I flew from France to Switzerland and many airrfields there have a procedure to email a report to customs. It is in the AIP but you get no confirmation nothing. Customs simply does not pick up the phone either. The locals say that is normal. Our home field in Germany is quite similar. You call the airport and they will inform customs. But you do not get any written confirmation either. Same for many Swiss airports. So far it works but if the financial risks are so high customs should do this properly and provide written legal confirmations.
Cobalt wrote:
in the UK customs used their right to confiscate cars (thousands) when used to ‘smuggle’ minor quantities
Try doing the same in Singapore and see what is the penalty prescribed by law
As soon as Singapore joins the EU… (yes, I realize this post is nonsensical and off-topic, so if Peter can delete it, it’d be for the best)
You know as well as I do that the procedures involved differ from airfield to airfield, which alone is total rubbish. Would all airfields have the same kind of procedure, the same form, the same people to talk to, all would be much easier.
Also it must be possible to expect of the people who run ain airfield to know the procedures. In Switzerland, every airfield which has this kind of customs arrangement has it printed on their website and of course if you talk to someone from that airfield they will know how it works. That is a minimal service I expect.
Likewise, customs and immigration are separate agencies, they should be sufficiently aware of the other, than not to tell people rubbish about the other agency. If I ask a customs official if I have to call immigration or vice versa, they must not tell them not to bother and if it goes wrong decline any responsibility. NOBODY can tell me that this police guys at Würzburg did not know that customs would be an issue. All concerned and asked by this guy for help simply did either not care or let the guy run into his financial ruin willingly. Airfields like this, where customer service is this low, should really get put on a warning list.
And finally, the financial consequences of a minor misjudgement are simply beyond anything a normal legal system would tolerate. Seeing that the same country punishes people who do much worse stuff with ridiculous fines and here ask amounts which are completely crazy. Basically, this reverts to the middle ages where local landlords would fleece travellers at will.
with such major risks at play
Yes – exactly. Normal aviation practices carry huge risks but these are unavoidable without doing what would be totally ridiculous due diligence, requiring a local language speaker as a minimum.
For example as stated above it is totally normal practice to do PNR for imm/customs, yet you get no confirmation or receipt, but if they don’t receive it, or claim they didn’t receive it, you could be in big trouble. So these officials, who are also not obliged to speak any English, can decide whether to hang you or not, on a whim. All it takes is one official who had a “bad night in bed” the night before and he can screw a bunch of pilots and there is nothing anybody can do (within a sub-6-digit legal budget).
I got a nasty case in Padova in Italy (which I wrote about many times since, to the disgust of certain “Italy-lovers” ) where they didn’t answer the phone, I sent in ~4 faxes, and god knows what else I tried the day before, but they refused me a landing from short final. The result was a horrible long day, first at a diversion to Treviso where they had / didn’t have avgas (according to whether you had mafia aeroclub “connections”) and later we refuelled at Friedrichshafen but only just in time due to Eurocontrol routing issues, and we eventually made it home minutes before the airport closed, and with the next few days unflyable due to wx. This sort of thing happens elsewhere e.g. somebody did the PNR by phone to Corfu and was denied landing because the said employee was not around the next day and told nobody about the phone call. Corfu was famous for this, for its absolutely manic operation of the “24hr PN” system where the only receipt was a fax with the rubber stamp on it.
Aviation is full of these practices (which are largely rooted in 1970s communist job protection attitudes, which survive in aviation because the magic word “safety” deflects any outside scrutiny) and we get away with them only because most of the time people at the enforcement end behave reasonably. And local pilots get away with them because, ahem, they are local
As another example, I landed at Aosta recently. I was absolutely assured by airport staff that a CV19 test certificate (currently required by Italy, according to various sources) is not required. The staff there are lovely and helpful, but I wasn’t quite convinced and got the test done anyway; £120. The result arrived hours before my departure, and inevitably (due to the time it takes to get the result) its required 72hr validity would have expired only a few hours after I landed there When I was met by the two policemen there, it became clear the test was expected. So… what are you supposed to do? The ELP of the airport staff is ok for the basic comms (and they were always responsive, even confirming, within the limits of ELP, that one could fly back out again if there was a problem), the ELP of the police was minus zero, and how many here want to be arrested and locked up in some “hotel” in Italy like these people – a procedure not worthy of a modern country in what we call the “European Union”.
Many of us come closer to a disaster than we think, when we fly to places further than the local burger run. We land with a plane worth a pile of money, and anybody in a uniform can walk up and demand a load more money for some unspecified reason. One is pretty vulnerable. Most of the time it works…
This German case is just one where somebody decided to hang somebody to make an example. There is zero justice in it.
Fenland_Flyer wrote:
Try doing the same in Singapore and see what is the penalty prescribed by law
For undeclared cigarettes (which is where this happened in the UK in a few hundreds of cases): around 125 Euro per pack.
https://www.customs.gov.sg/individuals/going-through-customs/offences
Steep by European standards.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
ou know as well as I do that the procedures involved differ from airfield to airfield,
I would never fly to an airfield in Switzerland which I do not positively know is a customs airfield
Mooney_Driver wrote:
and of course if you talk to someone from that airfield they will know how it works. That is a minimal service I expect.
Still I wouldn’t risk having to pay import duties based on what someone at the airfield tells me.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
very airfield which has this kind of customs arrangement
The very problem is, that the airfield we are talking about has no arrangement at all with any customs. They might have “a typical way of doing things” that might have worked in the past because no-one noticed, but they do not have an arrangement.
I would love a Europe where we have no borders – not for people and not for customs. But some countries choose that we should not have such a Europe – and if someone is to blame for the current situation it is these countries and not the other ones that simply execute a “if we have such borders because someone wants them we can not just act as if there were none”.
Cobalt wrote:
If this had been a criminal case, and assuming an income of say 3,000 Euro per month as a pensioner, the 30,000 ‘fine’ would be 300x daily net income, which is the equivalent of 9.5 month’s imprisonment if not paid – a ridiculous level.
Yes – and if the Swiss catch me driving 220km/h on the highway in Basel they will confiscate my car – even if I argue that this is not less safe as doing this perfectly legal just 5km north on the very same highway. And if you push the wrong button on your broker account website you might be “punished” with the same ridiculous amounts – and you can not argue “but when I robbed the damn bank the fine would be much less”. Those things happen.
International flight outside of your customs area is a thing that needs careful preparation and getting information from the right sources. Especially in cases where the rule is crystal clear (use a customs airport of entry) but you believe you know a shortcut to this rule.
