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I received this from a good friend who went as a
vendor to the WOC. Seems like the French are behaving as usual. Also had reports
on the scams the French pulled on visitors such as $100.00 for a short cabride,
etc.
We got back from WOC-Dijon last week, still abit
jet lagged, but almost recovering now.
Not sure if you knew anything about WOC in Dijon,
but we can say it's a mess. The French Authority seems not welcoming any foreign
participants.....almost all foreign participants got into trouble, either with
custom or the CITES.
To start with:
1) Philippines stall had all their plants
confiscated and force to donate all their orchids to the botanical garden, due
to the French authority believe their CITES documents were fake, but they allow
them to sell appendix I -fern.
2) Brazil orchids- had their plants in custom for a
week, due to custom formality and the authorize freight forwarder missing in
action. They didn't release their plants last 4 days of the show.
3) Peru-had their plants in custom for as long as
the Brazil orchid. But had all their very expensive species flask broken at the
base. All flasks broke the same manner and 50% of the seedlings missing during
custom.
4) Only few boxes of Madagascar orchid were
release, as they believe that others were collected from the wild and CITES
provided were fake.
5) Few Taiwan stall had compound and had some of
their plants confiscated, due to not listed in their list of CITES.
6) 2 foreign participants-refuse entry at Paris
.....didn't even have the chance to come close to Dijon.
7) Few arrested by the CITES police and charge to
court for illegally smuggling orchids to France from
Germany.
8)Thailand stall was smart, before coming to France
they enter from Germany ....sold whole shipment to a German nursery and then
re-buy for WOC-Dijon. So as long as entry point in EU, their plants become
legal. But the France authority still not happy with it and issue a compound.
9) 4 stalls simply pack and go when the authority
starts visiting their stall. We see them in the morning, by afternoon they were
gone.
10) Japan orchid had to pay a compound for some
formality reasons.
10) For us, they believe we have smuggle the orchid
into France and had all our plants seized for a few days...... When we arrived
at Paris, we can't find the freight forwarder, they had the original import
permit from France and suppose to do all formality for us, later we found out
that they were on strike. So we presented all our documents, CITES, Phyto,
Export Cert as well as copy of French import permit to the custom
at Charles de Gaulle. The custom officer looked through all the
document, without endorsement nor even bother to check our cargo they told
us to go. We arrived at Dijon, do our display and started selling for 21/2 days.
Then the CITES police came and after one full day of statement, they decided to
seize all our plants.....fortunately we have a witness at the airport, which is
the porter that had help us with translation as well as pushing the cargo
out of the airport......after confiscating our plants for 3 days, they finally
decided to release our plants, but we have to pay tax. Not much damage to us as
we had sold most of our pre-ordered plants during first 2 days, but we feel
sorry for all those foreign participants that had problem with the
French authority.
So far for now, catch up with you some other
time.
Regards |
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