May 16, 2014. Yekaterinburg Customs revealed a series of instances when foreign cars were imported temporarily in Sverdlovsk Region and sold illegally, the spokesperson for Ural Customs Administration reports.

‘Automobiles get transferred here from the Baltic States or from the CIS by the citizens of the said states and are then sold illegally to Russian Federation subjects without any customs duty payments or without an official certificate of title. The purchasers of such cars got pulled over in Yekaterinburg and in Sverdlovsk Region by road police officers and were only able to produce a passenger’s customs entry in somebody else’s name or in some Russian Federation citizen’s name as their proof of ownership,’ the press service explains.

Selling a temporarily imported vehicle is classed as a grave violation of the customs law and can mean a fine and confiscation of one’s vehicle (Article 16.24 (Part 2) of the Russian Federation Administrative Offense Code).

For one, citizens of Kyrgyzstan sold a number of foreign cars in Yekaterinburg which had been imported without any customs duty payments to some incautious Yekaterinburg residents at about half the market price. The offenders picked out the customers who were not particularly interested in the documentation relating to the car. Following the signature of the agreement, the sellers would go back to their home country, while the new drivers of cars with Kyrgyz license plates and no customs declarations got pulled over by road police and handed over to the customs officers who, in their turn, confiscated the cars as the current law requires.