Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.

Pity the Faulkland Islands, population 3,200 and about a million penguins. They have a 42% tariff.

Are you feeling great again, Americans?

This is to protect domestic penguin manufacturers. Well thought!

Yet they also are a British territory and the UK has a 10% tariff. What bonehead came up with that.

Now it is 1.4 mln, in future this could be 1000 more, if this will help with overcoming tariffs. Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022.

> Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022

Can you elaborate? Tried searching for it, all i found is that Kazakhstan reported 500M exports to Germany, when it was actually 7B. But you were talking about Exports from Germany to Kazakhstan, which I wasn't able to find.

gp implies that those are goods which ended up in Russia after the EU war sanctions.

oh, that would make sense, yes. AFAIK Turkey was also used a lot to accidentally ship goods to Russia.

Of course, several of these islands with 10% tarrifs are ex-colonies of various EU countries. Of course any french manufacturer will send goods to the islands (0%) then from there to the US (10%) rather than pay 20%. It's obvious, then the US will notice and the island will go to 20% and so on. It's all completely hateful.

The Guardian has investigated further: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...

In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.

For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.

It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake.

Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.

That may be the stupidest explanation I have heard yet.

It must be the correct one then. :-)

The Guardian are reporting essentially this, it's clerical errors of some kind:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...