2.

Article 1 of Regulation No 803/68 stipulates that: “For the purpose of applying the Common Customs Tariff, the value for customs purposes of the goods imported shall be taken to be the normal price, that is to say, the price which they would fetch... on a sale in the open market between a buyer and a seller independent of each other.” Article 9 thereafter confirms that the price paid or payable may be accepted as the value for customs purposes provided that, inter alia, it “corresponds, at the time it is agreed upon, to prices on a sale in the open market between a buyer and a seller independent of each other”. As I had occasion to observe in my opinion in the Châtain case, “there is... no doubt that what is paramount in the determination of the value for customs purposes of imported goods is the ‘notional’ normal price of the goods, not the price actually agreed upon and paid”. Consequently, in the case of a price agreed and paid in a sale not conducted under conditions of free competition, the national authority may depart from the invoice price in establishing the value for customs purposes. But in doing so it must set out to establish what is the normal price of the goods. Authority for that proposition is to be found in the Court's judgment of 13 March 1980 in Case 111/79 Caterpillar [1980] ECR 773. As regards the methods of valuation to be employed for the purpose of ascertaining the normal price, I have already had occasion to point out (in my opinion in the Châtain case) that “Community legislation is silent on the methods of valuation which apply when it is not possible to base the valuation on price”. It is therefore on the basis of the system of the Brussels Convention of 15 December 1950 — binding in the Community context — that a national customs authority, which is charged with applying Community rules also in the light of the aforementioned Convention, may proceed to value the goods on a basis other than the invoiced price. The Brussels Convention system is clearly directed towards measuring the customs duty against the objective value of the goods, which it is for the customs authorities to establish without being bound by the price appearing in the commercial documents. It is well known that a national authority may have recourse to the deductive method based on the price at which the goods are resold (this is treated in the abovementioned Caterpillar judgment at paragraphs 21 to 25 of the decision) and to the comparative method based on a comparison with the price paid for similar goods, but neither the one nor the other method allows the value indicated in a declaration made by the forwarding agent to the custom authorities of the exporting country to be taken as the sole point of reference. It suffices to bear in mind that the forwarding agent is different persona from the seller or the buyer and that his declaration may be prompted by interests and needs which are wholly extraneous to the determination of the objective value of the goods. In short, therefore, even though the price paid in a given sale does not bind the customs authority and is not automatically translated into the value for customs purposes of the goods, the determination of that value implies an investigation of the normal price of the goods in question under conditions of free competition and cannot be effected by reference to a declaration made by the forwarding agent.