MY & MI s.r.o.
Distribution of premium tobacco products in Slovakia and Europe with focus on cigars, cigarillos and pipe tobacco.
ID: 009088024205-02
Lobbying Activity
Response to Implementing act under Article 15(11) of the Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EU
6 Sept 2017
Article 6, Point 2: Completely impossible for cigars. Most of the cigars are produced in small factories hand made and in small batches. They will not be able to apply unit level UIs properly due to the lack of understanding and/or skills, or it will be extremely complicated. Also, it is very risky to send either tax stamps or unit level UI markers to the third countries such as Dominican republic, Nicaragua or Honduras (where cigars are made) - the risk of loosing the stamps or markers and the high probability of errors makes it much more efficient and reasonable to apply these at the moment of importation to EU.
Article 8, Point 1(c)-(d) the product description: this will not be possible for low sales volume products - sales for some cigars are less than 10 boxes per year in some EU countries. That would mean that the importer would have to create for example 5 specific unit level UIs for the given product and send them to the factory to be attached to the box.
Article 8, Point 1(d): It is rather unclear what date should be stated here in case of hand made products. Is it date when the cigar was rolled (and if so, which cigar of the whole box?), the date when it was checked and passed QA or is it a date when the cigars were put in packaging or a date when the whole box passed a final QA?
Article 9, Point 2: For cigars, cigarillos and other handmade products with small sales some data will be rather complicated to provide:
P_weight - handmade products vary a lot in weight, it is completely impossible to provide weight with accuracy 0.1 grams. It might be possible provide weight with margin +-10% and even that might not work in all cases. In general for handmade cigars the weight is provided as an average weight per 1000 pieces.
Other data might also be bit complicated - providing product specific data such as TP_ID, P_Brand, Intended_Market, Intended_Route1, Intended_Route2 might result in small orders of less than 10 codes. Please keep in mind that the sales volume for some cigars in some countries might be as little as few boxes a year. This is true especially for limited editions, special cigar humidors and so on. The better solution would be to provide these data additionally to the repository system at the time when the unit level UI is applied to a single package. This applies to the small volume products such as cigars or pipe tobacco. This way economic operator could order bigger batch of codes and then apply them on different boxes - this would simplify management of the UIs at the SMEs side.
Article 26, 1: For small importers it makes no sense to contract and manage their own primary repository. Each ID issuer or country (or maybe whole EU) should have their default primary repository so that SMEs are not burdened with this additional cost and setup. It might easily happen that the primary repository providers will set such prices for SMEs (or rather for companies dealing with relatively small number of UIs) that it will become a big disadvantage comparing to bigger companies or multinational corporations.
Article 33, 1: For SMEs this will be quite complicated. In general they do not have sufficient funds to create a system that would do it automatically for them, so they will have to enter the invoicing information twice - once in their accounting system and second in the track and trace system. High risk of mistakes is involved and lot of additional effort will make their life more complicated. There should be an exception for companies that are dealing with relatively small volumes of tobacco products.
Article 34, 4: I do not believe it is possible for most of the SMEs to notify about a receipt of the payment within 24 hours of the event - lot of them do not have an automatic connection between accounting system and bank accounts and the payments are marked in accounting system manually. Not to mention cases when the payment is not matched automatically due to imprecise payment data.
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