Cashew nut processing for export – Illustrative image (Photo: VNA)Rome (VNA) – A new positive development has been seen in the suspected scam involving 100 containers of Vietnamese cashew nuts exported to Italy, with eight containers already re-exported to the Netherlands by March 22, according to the
Vietnam Trade Office in Italy.
To continue supporting Vietnamese exporters who lost original documents of their goods in the case, representatives of the trade
office made a business trip to the port northern Italian city of La Spezia on March 22, to
ask the port authorities, financial police and shipping lines to help
reduce the loss of the Vietnamese exporters to the lowest.
Vietnamese Trade Counselor in Italy Nguyen Duc Thanh said
that La Spezia port authorities and Italian police had promised to detain 14-16 containers without original documents at the port.
Twenty-one others are expected to arrive in La Spezia and
Genova ports in the coming time, including six to La Spezia on March 26 and two
also to this port on March 28-29.
In the coming time, the Trade Office and the Embassy of
Vietnam in Italy will continue to work with shipping lines on issues related to
the case. According to Thanh, if it becomes a criminal case,
the handling may be faster, because there is information that the buyer has
hired lawyers and has contacted the lawyers of the sellers (Vietnamese
enterprises), shipping lines, and the court to claim delivery when they have the
original documents.
Currently, there is at least one set of original documents
that have been identified by COSCO (the freight forwarder) as real. This is the
first evidence that suspected scammers in Italy have somehow obtained the
original documents illegally without paying Vietnamese businesses.
Thanh also recommended that Vietnamese businesses and the Vietnam
Cashew Association (Vinacas) should work actively with relevant agencies in Vietnam
to make urgent decisions to enable Vietnamese businesses to early export
the goods.
According to Vinacas, through a Vietnamese broker, several
cashew nut exporters have signed contracts to export 100 containers of the
product to Italy, to be transported by international shipping lines Cosco,
YANGMING, HMM, and ONE to the ports of Genoa and La Spezia.
The Vietnamese sellers have received no payment to date,
though some containers have arrived in Italy while others are on the way.
The sellers reported that there are changes made to the
SWIFT code in the documents of collection sent from Vietnamese banks to those
allegedly representing the importer in Turkey. The Turkish banks declared the
buyer is not their client and said they had sent back the documents. It is
noteworthy that those banks neither specified how they had sent back the
documents nor provided Vietnamese banks with bills of lading.
Meanwhile, after some documents of collection were sent to
the buyer’s bank in Italy, the Italian bank replied that it had received only
copies of the bills of lading, not the original versions, causing rising
concerns among the exporters as the whereabouts of the original documents
remain unknown. Anyone with the original documents can present them to the
transporters for the release of the goods./.
