To continue supporting Vietnamese exporters who lost original documents of their goods in the case, representatives of the tradeoffice made a business trip to the port northern Italian city of La Spezia on March 22, toask the port authorities, financial police and shipping lines to helpreduce the loss of the Vietnamese exporters to the lowest.
Vietnamese Trade Counselor in Italy Nguyen Duc Thanh saidthat 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 andGenova ports in the coming time, including six to La Spezia on March 26 and twoalso to this port on March 28-29.
In the coming time, the Trade Office and the Embassy ofVietnam in Italy will continue to work with shipping lines on issues related tothe case. According to Thanh, if it becomes a criminal case,the handling may be faster, because there is information that the buyer hashired lawyers and has contacted the lawyers of the sellers (Vietnameseenterprises), shipping lines, and the court to claim delivery when they have theoriginal documents.
Currently, there is at least one set of original documentsthat have been identified by COSCO (the freight forwarder) as real. This is thefirst evidence that suspected scammers in Italy have somehow obtained theoriginal documents illegally without paying Vietnamese businesses.
Thanh also recommended that Vietnamese businesses and the VietnamCashew Association (Vinacas) should work actively with relevant agencies in Vietnamto make urgent decisions to enable Vietnamese businesses to early exportthe goods.
According to Vinacas, through a Vietnamese broker, severalcashew nut exporters have signed contracts to export 100 containers of theproduct 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 theSWIFT code in the documents of collection sent from Vietnamese banks to thoseallegedly representing the importer in Turkey. The Turkish banks declared thebuyer is not their client and said they had sent back the documents. It isnoteworthy that those banks neither specified how they had sent back thedocuments nor provided Vietnamese banks with bills of lading.
Meanwhile, after some documents of collection were sent tothe buyer’s bank in Italy, the Italian bank replied that it had received onlycopies of the bills of lading, not the original versions, causing risingconcerns among the exporters as the whereabouts of the original documentsremain unknown. Anyone with the original documents can present them to thetransporters for the release of the goods./.