Russia ready to deal with Switzerland over customs collaboration

Russia has offered Switzerland to sign an agreement in collaboration in the sphere of customs, Ruslan Davydov, first deputy director of Russia’s Federal Customs Service told TASS on Saturday, on the sidelines of a conference of the World Customs Organization, which took place in Vienna on April 19-21. The event was attended by representatives of 51 nations and the EU. Russia has become a member of WCO in 1992,  as a legal successor to the USSR.

"Russia and Switzerland don’t have a general agreement on collaboration in the sphere of customs," Davydov said. "We held talks and agreed to try and meet each other halfway and to initiate an agreement of the kind."
The stressed the importance of contacts of this kind, adding: "We have a need to ask definite information from the Swiss in connection with various financial patterns but the Swiss tell us they can’t give it out to us because they don’t have an agreement with us."
"In the light of it, we offered them to sign a document of this kind," Davydov said.
Transits in the European region were the central issue at the conference of Europe region member entities. 

The WCO develops, implements and upgrades the legal instruments in the sphere of customs operations and is a depositary of seventeen international conventions, including the Kyoto Convention, which is known officially as the International Convention on the Simplification and Harmonization of Customs Procedures.