LONDON: A woman whose designer crocodile-skin handbag was seized by the UK Border Force has triumphed in a test case bid to get it back.
The £2,000 designer tote bag, hand-made in Japan, was a 50th birthday gift for Hampstead woman, Sabine Smouha, from her husband Jeremy, the director of an investments company.
But, when it arrived in Britain in 2013, customs officers confiscated it because Nile crocodiles are a protected species and it didn’t have the right documentation.
The Border Force has repeatedly refused to return it to her, because it it did not have the required endangered species import permit.
Now, however, Mrs Smouha – who said she was ‘very sad to lose her birthday present’ – has been handed victory by a tribunal judge.
