KARACHI: A Customs appellate bench of High Court of Sindh comprising Justice Aqeel AhmedAbbasi and Justice Mrs Ashraf Jahan admitting a Special Customs Reference Application suspended an order passed by Special Customs Appellate Tribunal (SCTA) in favour of All Pakistan Motor Dealers Association (APMDA), a group claiming to be importers.
The SCRA was filed by Director and Director General, Valuation through Khalid Rajpar advocate challenging the order of the appellate tribunal which suspended the Valuation Ruling 1051 of 2017 and Order in Revision on ground of violation of section 25-A of the Customs Act 1969.
The controversy pertains to the computation of price of per unit (per vehicle) of 1800 CC or more imported from Japan. APDMA maintains that custom officials failed to pass the impugned VR 1051 of 2017 which replaced earlier VR 655 of 2014 as per section 25. No adherence was made to the section 25-A, the appellant/ petitioners in CP-D 2913 of 2018 maintains.
The applicant/custom officials maintains that the impugned VR 1051 of 2017 was passed after adopting full procedure and taking all stake holders on board. The Valuation department maintains APDMA is not an aggrieved party nor could be termed stake holders as they are just working on commission and have nothing to do with import of the vehicles, duty and taxes of which are determined by the impugned VR. Khalid Rajpar also informed the bench that by making a mis-statement appellant APDMA obtained an order from another bench of SHC in CP-D 2913 of 2017 regarding initiation of contempt proceedings against the applicant department.
The bench today after hearing Khalid Rajpar suspended the order of the Customs Appellate Tribunal while putting of further proceedings till June 07.