$120,000 of IT assets stuck in German Customs in Cologne

Need the OT's help. I thought about money board, thought about tech board, thought about travel board, but decided to come here for at least a modicum of entertainment.

I had four boxes containing IT hardware shipped Fedex from Atlanta to Germany. The pickup driver only picked up two of them initially.

Those two got stuck in customs waiting on the other two.

The other two got picked up two days later, and got to their final destination without issue.

When fedex was made aware of this, we were told to amend the commercial invoice to reflect only the two boxes in customs, since the other two were already done. So we did.

Now German customs says we need to pay duties on the two boxes they are still sitting on. German customs said they contacted the recipient and they refused to pay. However, I contacted the recipient and they said they haven't heard anything from customs.

Fedex says they can pay the duties for us, and bill back to our account (we have multi-million dollar fedex account).

But... fedex says before they do that, they need a C-level exec to sign a power of attorney, get it notarized, then snail mail the original to their office in Memphis, wait for that to be processed, before they can pay the duty for us.


I've shipped many many things to Germany and UK and Canada with fedex and never, ever, ever dealt with any of this kind of bullshite.

Someone tell me what to do.