Trinidad businessman can sue Customs in sex toys impasse

(Trinidad Guardian) Businessman and sex ther­a­pist Giri­raj “Raj” Ram­nanan has been giv­en the green light to pur­sue a law­suit against the Comp­trol­ler of the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion over the seizure of three ship­ments of sex toys and oth­er para­pher­na­lia.

De­liv­er­ing an oral rul­ing at the Hall of Jus­tice in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, High Court Judge Ricky Rahim grant­ed Ram­nanan leave to pur­sue his ju­di­cial re­view law­suit against the di­vi­sion.

In the law­suit, Ram­nanan, the own­er of To­tal Im­age Lim­it­ed, is claim­ing the di­vi­sion is act­ing il­le­gal­ly in its de­lay in bring­ing pro­ceed­ings against his com­pa­ny to for­feit the al­leged­ly pro­hib­it­ed items. His lawyers, Jagdeo Singh, Di­nesh Ram­bal­ly, Kiel Tak­lals­ingh and Ka­ri­na Singh, con­tend the Cus­toms Act re­quires the di­vi­sion to bring such pro­ceed­ings with­in a rea­son­able time af­ter a seizure.

Be­fore grant­i­ng leave, Rahim asked the di­vi­sion’s lawyer, Har­richa­ran Kassie, about the al­leged de­lay. Kassie could not im­me­di­ate­ly jus­ti­fy it be­fore Rahim.

Rahim gave Ram­nanan’s lawyers un­til Oc­to­ber 9 to file the claim and ad­journed the case to No­vem­ber 1.

Ac­cord­ing to an af­fi­davit from Ram­nanan at­tached to the ju­di­cial re­view ap­pli­ca­tion, he pur­chased and shipped the pack­ages to Trinidad be­tween Au­gust and No­vem­ber, last year. The pack­ages, to­geth­er val­ued at US$1,045.27, con­tained con­doms, pe­nis pumps, whips, vi­bra­tors and dil­dos. The pack­ages were seized by the di­vi­sion’s en­force­ment unit for con­tain­ing pro­hib­it­ed items.

In Feb­ru­ary, Ram­nanan and his at­tor­neys met with Cus­toms of­fi­cials over the ship­ments and were of­fered to plead guilty to the il­le­gal im­por­ta­tion of the items or face for­fei­ture. How­ev­er, no for­fei­ture pro­ceed­ings were filed and the items were not re­turned.

While Ram­nanan elect­ed to not plead to the charges, he ad­mit­ted he had done so with oth­er ship­ments in the past. But say­ing he did so be­grudg­ing­ly, Ram­nanan said: “How­ev­er, on the ma­jor­i­ty of oc­ca­sions the very same items would be re­leased af­ter be­ing ini­tial­ly de­tained by Cus­toms be­cause the pre­sid­ing Cus­toms Of­fi­cer was of the view that the very same items were not breach­ing the law and not in­de­cent or ob­scene.”

Ram­nanan claimed his busi­ness has suf­fered as a re­sult of the seizures.

In ad­di­tion to de­c­la­ra­tions that the di­vi­sion act­ed il­le­gal­ly and an or­der seek­ing the im­me­di­ate re­lease of the items, Ram­nanan is seek­ing fi­nan­cial com­pen­sa­tion for the loss­es he in­curred.

The is­sue of the le­gal­i­ty of im­port­ing sex toys arose last month af­ter e-couri­er Web Source is­sued a no­tice to its cus­tomers warn­ing that such in­ti­mate items fell un­der the di­vi­sion’s list of pro­hib­it­ed items. The list in­clud­ed oth­er con­ven­tion­al con­tra­band, in­clud­ing drugs, firearms and cam­ou­flage cloth­ing.

But Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert re­spond­ed to pub­lic furore over the is­sue, say­ing there was no law di­rect­ly pro­hibit­ing the im­por­ta­tion of such items. How­ev­er, he not­ed it was with­in the di­vi­sion’s purview to de­ter­mine what con­sti­tut­ed in­de­cent or ob­scene items un­der the leg­is­la­tion.