Vehicle importers have appealed to authorities for the immediate release of nearly 1,000 vehicles held at Sri Lankan ports over an unresolved dispute about cross-border Letters of Credit, Hiru News reported.
Representatives of the trade said the prolonged delay in clearing the shipments has caused severe operational difficulties and mounting financial losses, and that they expect officials to intervene to resolve what they described as legal and technical obstacles.
A month after Customs said it would fix this
The appeal is notable less for the number than for the date.
On 11 August, Sri Lanka Customs appointed a special committee to find a solution to exactly this dispute — vehicles brought into the country through Letters of Credit but then denied final customs clearance. The committee was tasked with examining the circumstances of the affected consignments and recommending settlement measures, and its findings were expected to determine how the held consignments were treated.
Four weeks later, importers are publicly asking for the same vehicles to be released. Hiru’s report does not mention the committee, and no outlet has reported what it concluded, whether it has reported at all, or whether its recommendations were adopted.
What the dispute is about
The consignments at issue were financed through cross-border Letters of Credit — credit opened in a third country rather than in the country where the vehicle was manufactured. Customs has treated that structure as a valuation problem rather than a paperwork one, on the basis that a third-country LC can be used to declare a purchase price below the vehicle’s real value and so reduce the duty payable.
Importers’ position is that the obstacles are legal and technical and can be cleared administratively. The two framings are not reconcilable by release alone: if the objection is under-valuation, releasing the vehicles requires either accepting the declared values or agreeing revised ones.
A number that should not be compared across reports
The figure of about 1,000 vehicles cannot be read against earlier counts in this file without checking what each was counting.
In May, the Deputy Minister of Finance said 1,782 vehicles were covered by the 380 LCs opened on 15 May, the day before a 50 percent import surcharge was gazetted — a cohort defined by the date its credit was opened, in a dispute about a surcharge that was later extended to December. That is a different set of vehicles from the ones held over cross-border LC valuation, and the two totals do not describe the same thing.
Vehicle imports were restricted from 2020 during the balance of payments crisis and reopened in phases, leaving successive cohorts of consignments caught between changing rules.
Not reported
Hiru does not name the importers’ body making the appeal, say which ports hold the vehicles or how they are split between Colombo and Hambantota, or say how long the oldest consignments have been held. It does not put a value on the stranded stock, say what demurrage or storage charges have accrued and who bears them, or carry any response from Sri Lanka Customs, the Finance Ministry or the Central Bank.
It also does not say what became of the August committee.
Sourcing note
Hiru News is the only verified newsroom to have filed on this appeal. The Daily Mirror’s latest-news listing carried no vehicle-import item, NewsFirst’s latest listing carried none, and Ada Derana returned a CloudFront 403 domain-wide throughout this cycle. Earlier reporting on the same dispute by the Daily Mirror and Daily FT falls well outside the freshness window and is not cited here.
