23 January 2004
Belarus' customs chief vows that seized BMW will be returned to German owner

 Aleksandr Shpilevsky, chairman of Belarus' State Customs Committee (SCC), assured reporters on Thursday that the authorities would return the BMW car that was seized from a German citizen by the Belarusian customs last summer. "Do not worry, the car will be returned; it will
be returned by the Supreme [Economic] Court's decision," he said.
Mr. Shpilevsky acknowledged that the decision to seize the car was wrong. "Since the Supreme Court has decided that the car should be returned, we will return it, of course, or pay money for it," he said.
As SCC Deputy Chairman Ivan Dubik told local customs officers in Brest last week, the German entered a Belarusian checkpoint on the Polish border at around 4 p.m., but all the senior officers had already left their workplaces by that time. The man had to wait until the following day, when he was accused of violating regulations for temporarily brought-in cars.
A district judge, and later the Brest Regional Court, ordered the confiscation of the EUR60,000 vehicle. Although the Supreme Economic Court annulled that decision as far back as October 3, the vehicle so far has not been returned to the owner. Holger Kraemer, first secretary with the German embassy in Minsk, said earlier this week that the embassy was concerned about the delay in returning the vehicle, which was still being kept in a Minsk garage. "That garage belongs to the presidential property management department, and since mid-October, they've been telling us some technical preconditions for releasing the car are missing," he told BelaPAN on Wednesday. "We wrote letters to the department in November and later in December, but
there has been no clear reply so far. Now that three and a half months have passed since the Supreme Economic Court annulled the confiscation order, the car still remains de facto confiscated, because it
still has not been returned to the rightful owner and he cannot use it."
The embassy will continue pressing for returning the car, he stressed.