How do I prove excessive quantity of goods are for my personal use?

Europe has this regulation of certain amount of certain goods you can cary while traveling between EU countries. For example you can carry 800 cigarettes, 90 litres of wine etc.

Now some EU countries have this limit a bit lower and if you carry more than the limit you might have to prove the goods were bought in EU (provide a receipt) and are for your personal use. As I understand personal use is anything you get no money for (actual personal use - smoking, drinking – or using the goods as gifts, etc.).

However there is no information on how to prove the goods are for your personal use. Has anyone had any experience with this?

Best Answer

The official website from the EU Commission mentions several criteria:

The commercial status of the holder of the products and his reasons for holding them;

The place where the products are located or, if appropriate, the mode of transport used;

Any document relating to the products;

The nature of the products;

The quantity of the products.

There is always some judgment involved and generalising from individual experience might therefore not be very useful but if you really need to carry more than 90 litres of wine for your personal use across a border, then you presumably would be able to explain why. I suspect the question is puzzling because you do not really need 90 litres of wine for your personal use. As far as documentary evidence goes, anything could help (evidence of past consumption, evidence that you are a collector, evidence you have enough money to afford so much wine without reselling it at some point, etc.) but a random check is not necessarily very likely.

If you read between the lines, you can see the quantities are quite generous (compared to what you can carry between just about any other pair of countries, especially for alcohol) and the criteria are designed to provide cover to the police in obvious cases. That's purely a guess but I suspect that if you come back from Scotland with twenty bottles of whisky, carefully packed in your trunk, all of them different, you should be able to argue they are for your personal use successfully. If you have thousands of identical cigarettes in some hidden compartment in a truck, you can't turn around and somehow prove they are for “personal use” if you get caught because it's obvious you were trying to smuggle them.