The heads of General Motors, Toyota, and Nissan Russia-based factories placed their official petition with the Head of the Russian Federation Customs Service Andrei Yemelyanov in order to explain that their businesses run a risk of assembly line stoppages due to the recent changes in the customs clearance regulations for car parts, says Kommersant.

The car manufacturers say in the petition that several customs posts have already been closed down in Saint Petersburg, which made the factories ‘adopt new logistics schemes urgently and incur additional losses related to the car parts delivery.’

Now the Customs Service decided to replace the posts in Saint Petersburg with a new Pushkinskiy customs point in the village of Shushary, located on the premises of a private National Container Company. This decision outraged the region’s other container businesses.

‘This customs post cannot possibly handle all the logistics, as over 2,000 container trains will arrive there every month, and the local infrastructure cannot support this. All this creates a risk of production stoppage and even jeopardizes the launch of new car makes in our factories in Saint Petersburg,’ Kommersant quotes the head of the automobile businesses as saying.