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To me this excuse of Customs is a bit lame. Our company has stuff going through Customs all of the time, and the longest anything has been held is 2 weeks. This has been a few months now....
I used to work in a shipping department bringing in 57,000+ tonnes of goods a month by road and 5 times that by tank ship and container. Very rarely had anything held up and when we did, polite but regular contact with customs usually resolved the issue quickly. You certainly don't want to pi$$ of C&E as they can make your life a misery. Always found it worth getting know the customs guys at the ports we used to come in through and they were always very helpful.