Changes in determining the country of origin of products purchased under public procurement

The EAEU Council made significant changes to the rules for determining the country of origin of certain goods for the purposes of public procurement. From now on, certain types of goods from the light industry, paper industry and trolleybuses will be subject to an assessment taking into account the country of production.

What will change in the rules for determining the country of origin?

The most important rules of the country of origin criterion described above have been agreed with the "Rules for determining the country of origin in the Commonwealth of Independent States" signed on November 20, 2009. It has recently been decided that the ST-1 certificate of origin will have to be provided to the manufacturer for goods from the light industry, paper industry and trolleybuses in order to be entered in the Eurasian Register. This applies to public procurement, and more precisely to Annex 1 to the "Rules for determining the country of origin". The introduced changes mainly concern the detailed application of the Regulations. This change was necessary to clarify the names of certain items.

Major changes in naming

One of the examples is the name "Lathes, boring and milling machines for metal" given in Annex 1 to the Regulations, which does not cover all types of machine tools for which production conditions are established. This heading includes, in addition to the items mentioned in the name, also machines for roughing and grinding, sharpening, honing, lapping, polishing and for carrying out other finishing operations on metals or cermets with grinding stones, abrasives or polishing agents, with the exception of wheel cutting machines gear grinding or gear finishing machines. Such inaccuracies have created a lot of confusion, and the changes introduced help to avoid this kind of situation.

Changes to the Unified Commodity Nomenclature

A significant part of the introduced changes is related to the introduction, from January 1, 2022, of a new version of the Unified Commodity Nomenclature for Foreign Economic Activity of the EAEU, which was approved by the Commission Council Decision of September 14, 2021. In accordance with the adopted provisions, the trucks will be classified under the TN VED EAEU codes 8701 21, 8701 22, 8701 23, 8701 24, 8701 29. Thus, the code existing in the current version of Annex 1 will be removed next year.