consignment

Only one consignment arrived with false documents in 2022, it added, and that all dogs brought in before and since had had fully legitimate paperwork.

The rice dispute involved a consignment of around four or five tonnes - which he had tested as he was worried about its safety and then ordered that it be destroyed.

He pointed to a separate issue when "an exceptionally large" consignment of telegraph poles were imported during last month's Wake the Giant festival.

After zigzagging hundreds of miles across Europe, the contents of the consignment had been verified five days earlier by customs officers at Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, ready for its road trip to Belgium.

And they are no longer paying him on delivery, he says, instead adopting a "sale or return" model where consignments not sold are returned to the company, entirely transferring the risk to the manufacturer.