The administrative act of 18.900.000 AMD liability was declared invalid.
- 2020-02-12
By the decision of the Health և labor Inspection body, our client company was held administratively liable for importing and selling drugs in violation of the requirements of the legislation.
According to the inspection body, the claimant should have applied to the RA’s Ministry of Health for those drugs and receive an import certificate.
It should be noted that the lawsuit filed by us was based on the argument that the administrative body violated the two-month period of imposing an administrative liability as set out by the RA’s Code on Administrative Offenses, in response to which the latter stated that the offense was detected through inspections and concluded that the norm envisaging an exception to the general rule of Article 37 of the VIV Code is applicable, by which administrative liability can be brought within two months from the date of detection of the violation by inspection and not from the date of commitment of the offense
What is important is that for the application of that provision, it is a necessary precondition that the offense was impossible to detect in any other way than by inspection, and the offense is detected exclusively by inspection.
However, the examination of the administrative proceedings revealed that no inspection was carried out during proceedings. Moreover, it was also found that it was not necessary to carry out an inspection to reveal the mentioned offense, as the customs body sends information on the imported goods to the RA’s Ministry of Health, that is to say, the inspection body had an another opportunity to reveal the alleged violation.
Based on those findings, the RA’s Administrative Court upheld the claim, annulling the decision of the inspection body, imposing an administrative liability of 18,900,000 AMD.
What is more important is that the inspection body based its decision on a legal act (Government Decision 581-N), which had expired, to which we will return in more details later.