The Customs Department has given the Plaza Lama department store until Monday, 18 October to pay RD$252 million in import taxes that the government department says were evaded by smuggling merchandise into the country. Miguel Cocco, who oversaw Customs operations from 1996-2000 and is now back at the helm of the department, ordered the intervention measure, as well as an audit of the goods sold in the stores.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Jose Manuel Hernandez instructed the auditors to desist from these actions on the grounds that their intervention was in violation of the new Penal Procedures Code. The Customs Department has responded to the DA to say that they could be accused of acting in complicity with Plaza Lama. The matter was resolved through the intervention of Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito, and the DA consented to the intervention once Customs requested an authorization to intervene in the store from a corresponding judge.
Hernandez Peguero maintained that Customs officials could not order the closure of a company without the order of a judge. The Customs department, however, said that it has irrefutable proof that Plaza Lama perpetrated a massive fraud in the way it brought hundreds of appliances into the country without paying taxes. While Cocco says he is acting on the authority granted to the Department of Customs by Law 3489, the district attorney says that the aspects of this law are now subject to the rulings of the Penal Procedures Code.