Shipping a QEG: Customs, taxes, traveling with a QEG core through carry on luggage and more.

[Hopegirl]

Shipping QEG parts, and dealing with the different taxes and customs laws for different countries can vary greatly for each situation. This is an important topic that we hope our members can add their information too. I’ve created this topic just for this purpose. If you can add a brief description of your experience, your tax amounts, or any links you’ve found for others who may wish to ship QEG’s and parts around the world.

Below is a brief example of some of the experiences the QEG family has had while building 5 QEG’s in 4 countries.  I must be careful and state that these are just ideas and we haven’t proven them all out yet, so none of this is a guarantee of one correct path… plus all countries and situations are different so there are too many variables to count that can change your outcome. But with all that said, here goes:

Torelco hasn’t had any problem shipping to other countries using Magellan Freight. Especially when it is under a customer status, as most would be. (in some cases like ours we had to classify it was a “donation” to a humanitarian project”)

If you are a citizen of the country you are shipping to this should help make it smooth for receiving it.

In the past we called it a “transformer core sample for electric generator” as the description on the shipping forms.

Of course don’t ever say “free energy” on any official form..lol, its  just an “electronic component for an engine your building as a hobby” also the use of the word “sample” is important, meaning it is “not for sale”.

When we built in Taiwan, Morocco, and England we had Torelco ship the core each time. It arrived in one wooden crate box, weighed about 120 pounds and was 24”x 24”x 21”.  There were no problems clearing the core through Taiwan customs, nor through UK customs, in both cases import taxes were charged and the private builders in Taiwan and in the UK both paid the customs taxes out of their pocket. We do not know how much those taxes were (as these builds were private and we did not have public access to all their info, we just showed up to build for them and reported our progress on our blog).

The way they calculate taxes is different for each country.

For example for Morocco:
The value of the shipment + cost to ship it= Total times (x) about 20% is the tax
Except they categorize every item you ship and each item has its own tax rate so above is just a guestimate.

In Australia (which is one of the worst countries) tax can be 100%, so a $3,000 core would have close to $3,000 in taxes for a total of $6,000. At least this is what we’ve heard from some Australian builders, but we don’t know if this is factual… perhaps there was a work around we didn’t hear about?

In 2014 in Morocco, we were the ones in charge of this build. Back then our family was travelling, and the core arrived in Morocco while we were still in Taiwan. We were relying on a group of volunteers (whom had no experience with collecting items from customs) to receive the core for us through customs.  The core arrived in Casablanca and our volunteers went to get it, customs would not release it to them. Honestly I don’t remember the specific reasons, but it is possible that they were not us, so ID’s did not match, or they were arguing over the tax… again I don’t know. All I know is that we had been relying on “other people to handle it” for us, which did not work. We’ve learned since this time.

After two weeks of broken language phone calls to the customs office with no results, we took a two day trip to Casablanca and spent 8 hours in the customs office arguing our case with them in French and Arabic (languages none of us speak so we had many translators). Finally after miracles and BRIBING one of the corrupt officials, we got them to release the core to us by paying $80 in tax for a shipment that had a value of $1,500 and cost about $500 to ship.

At the time these were the issues that were preventing us from getting out shipment released from customs:

#1 we were not a company
#2 we were not a Moroccan company
#3 we were not a humanitarian association
#4 we were not Moroccan residents, we were just visiting for 1 month
#5 the core was not a product being sold to a customer in morocco, it was a donation
#6 the first people we had sent to pick up our shipment were not us.

In all cases, we shipped individual parts to the builds and assembled and tuned the QEG on location. We never shipped a fully assembled QEG and highly discourage this. Shipping separate parts is much safer and less suspicious.
I also think that transporting it as cargo on your flight would work well too if you make all the phone calls to the airline and find out what is needed there. We’ve been able to get dc motors, variacs and other electrical components packed in peoples suitcases through airport customs this way. We have never taken a QEG core through an airport on our person. I heard one person say they planned on taking their QEG core as cargo onto a plane to Peru from the US. I do not know if they managed to do this, but it is likely that they did.

I also spoke with a wealthy business investor / inventor. Who takes trips to Brazil from the US often and when he does this he says it is cheaper and easier to take large items with him as cargo on the plane.  In some cases he said it was actually cheaper to buy a plane ticket and fly it there himself than it would be to have a company ship it for him. Again, I did not check this for myself yet, but I think its worthwhile to look into.

At the time of writing this post, the QEG family is attempting to get customs to release a large shipment to us sent from the US to Morocco. However this shipment is not just a standard QEG core. Our shipment weighs 1,000 pounds, takes up a palette of about 6 feet X 6 feet X 6 feet, and contains 2 cores, other equipment, some personal items like clothing and medicinal herbs and gifts for our community center participants. This mix of items complicates the tax calculation, our business status is different now and we have partnered with humanitarian associations that should help us get a tax exempt status plus a whole bunch of other bureaucratic nonsense that would take about 100 more pages to explain and is most likely not applicable to an average QEG builders shipping situation.

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