GRA wrongfully classified Land Cruiser as “passenger vehicle” – High Court

An East Coast Demerara (ECD) businessman has won a lawsuit he filed against the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) over its wrongful classification of his 2020 Toyota Land Cruiser as a passenger vehicle. As a consequence of that classification, he had been required to pay almost $14 million in taxes and duty on the vehicle.

In March 2020, cattle farmer Mohamed Shaw Jahan named the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and Commissioner-General Godfrey Statia as respondents in a High Court action he filed, in which he maintained that the vehicle he had imported from the United Kingdom is a light goods vehicle and should attract only about $1.8M in duty and taxes.
In a ruling delivered on Thursday, Justice Damone Younge declared that the GRA had wrongfully classified the vehicle, which she declared is a goods vehicle that fell under tariff heading 8704.
As such, the Judge granted an order of mandamus, compelling GRA to classify the vehicle as such, and to accept the $1,871,457 in taxes and duty already paid by the businessman.

7 days to comply
The GRA has been given seven days to comply with the court’s order. Justice Younge also ordered the tax agency to take all steps necessary to release Jahan’s vehicle, and to reimburse him the costs of storing it at the John Fernandes Terminal.

The GRA has also been ordered to bear the costs of the lawsuit.
Since its arrival in Guyana on December 20, 2020, Jahan had been unable to clear the vehicle owing to the duties being demanded by the GRA. In the circumstances, the Land Cruiser was left at the terminal, thereby incurring storage costs.
In Jahan’s lawsuit, drafted by Attorney-at-law Siand Dhurjon, the businessman insisted that the vehicle was classified as a “light goods vehicle” at the time of its purchase back in October 2020, and should attract only around $1.8 million in taxes and duty. The GRA had, however, insisted otherwise.
According to Attorney Dhurjon, because the Land Cruiser is a special model, with only two seats, two doors, two ventilating windows, a flatbed cargo area to the rear, and a barrier between the cargo area and the driver’s area, it is “exclusively qualified to be a goods vehicle”.
The lawyer had maintained that any classification of the vehicle as a passenger vehicle would be an erroneous misclassification and a misapprehension of the Common External Tariff found in Schedule 1 of the Customs Act, the Harmonised System Classification Codes, and the World Customs Organisation’s Explanatory Notes on the issue.
In an affidavit in support of his claim, Jahan had stated, “When a vehicle is permitted to be registered as a goods vehicle, it is granted a very favourable tax treatment.”
Dhurjon, in an invited comment following the Judge’s ruling, has said, “This is believed to be the first case of its kind in Guyana. The learned Judge went to the extent of physically viewing the vehicle in person before arriving at her decision.”
According to Attorney Dhurjon, during the court proceedings, GRA’s lawyers admitted that the agency “has no written policy, guidelines or information available from their office on what features/criteria they would accept or deny to classify a vehicle as a goods vehicle.”
Dhurjon has said that different employees of the GRA would give contradictory information on what they would and would not accept as a goods vehicle, as opposed to a passenger vehicle.
“Mr Statia submitted that the presence of two receptacles in which cups could be placed and what they called ‘sports rims’ on the vehicle indicated that the vehicle was a passenger vehicle,” the lawyer has said.
Prior to instituting the lawsuit, Dhurjon disclosed, his client had, on many occasions, sought the intervention of Statia over the wrong classification of the enclosed 2,800cc diesel van as a “vehicle principally designed for the transport of persons”. That intervention never materialised, he said.
“Mr Jahan was referred to another officer of the GRA, who maintained the erroneous position that the vehicle is a passenger vehicle. A ‘Classification Committee’ of the GRA later sustained such a ruling in a vague letter sent to Mr Jahan,” the lawyer stated. (G1)