Seeing red
British wine agent describes post-Brexit bureaucracy as a “multiple pile-up in the fog”.
By Marc Allen, Maritime Direct UK.
Major wine importer, Daniel Lambert, has lambasted the British government over post-Brexit red tape, reports the Guardian.
Lambert who imports up to 2m bottles of wine, and supplies over 300 retailers, has accused Westminster of not thinking Brexit through. He says that ‘complex and unworkable’ HM Revenue and Customs regulations mean that he is currently unable to import wine from the EU.
In a strident statement, he told the Guardian:
“We were a pretty good little business, we were doing quite well, until Brexit came along… While we knew Brexit would be a car crash, we did not know it was going to be a multiple pile-up…
“HM Revenue and Customs are being as helpful as they can be, but it’s not their fault they are civil servants. This is the government’s fault and they don’t give a shit about business. Boris Johnson said ‘fuck business’ and this is exactly what they are doing.”
Better prepared than most for the Brexit – and its worst-case scenario, a no-deal Brexit – he even went as far as setting up a bonded warehouse system where all customs paperwork could be done in-house rather than at the border.
The crux of the problem, he says, lies with a complex piece of paperwork called ‘Chief‘, so complex in fact that it lists 10,000 different combinations (CPCs) of classifications for imported products. Before Brexit he said importation from all over the world went “like clockwork”, but now the new system requires him to answer 64 different questions just to import a bottle of wine.
