At the end of 2019, the parliament adopted the budgetary-fiscal policy for 2020, which brings new rules of activity in the field of purchase and marketing of walnut kernels in Moldova. These changes legislate the activity of the person who purchases the walnut kernels from people. Now, in order to be able to perform this activity, the person must register with the State Tax Service. The intermediary will be obliged to enter in a borderou information about the volume and region from which the Walnut core was purchased.

The new provisions also stipulate that the intermediary who procures from the population the nut core declares on its own responsibility that the information about the origin of the commodity corresponds to the information in the border.  Until these changes, the intermediate person who procured the Walnut kernel from the population and subsequently sold it to the exporting companies, was not liable for the traded goods.

That’s because in the documents he prepared in the process of acquiring the commodity, the intermediary entered the data of the sellers – who ultimately bore responsibility, including tax, for the nut core they were selling. Sometimes, erroneous data, such as another quantity of goods sold or identity data about non-existent persons, were entered in the documents of origin of the goods. In the end, all these inaccuracies affected the process of obtaining by exporting companies, the certificate of origin of the nut kernel, thus complicating the process of marketing this product on foreign markets.

The issue came to the Economic Council’s attention in September 2019 at the request of the European Business Association and the Prime Minister’s control Body. Following a series of meetings, amendments were proposed for the fiscal budgetary policy that affect not only the Walnut kernel market in Moldova, but also the entire field of agricultural products purchases from horticulture and phytotechnics and plant kingdom objects.

The Secretariat of the Economic Council to the Prime Minister is  supported  by  the  European  Bank  for  Reconstruction  and  Development, funded by the UK Government’s Good Governance Fund, and the World Bank Group project “Investment Climate Reform”, funded by the Sweden.

The Secretariat of the Economic Council to the Prime Minister is supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, funded by the UK Government’s Good Governance Fund.