How procedural compliance without enforcement became Europe’s most expensive industrial policy mistake and what the e-bike sector reveals about a system that is failing the compliant operator.

Arno Saladin is founder of Ludovicus Advisory. He was Secretary of EEVC WG10 (which drafted EU Directive 2003/102/EC on pedestrian and cyclist protection), a longstanding member of LEVA-EU, former Product Manager for Power Assist Systems at Yamaha Motor Europe, and former Vice President at Rad Power Bikes with responsibility for the European market. He launched both the first L1e-A pedelec and the first L1e-B cargo e-trike in Europe.

There is a specific kind of silence in European regulatory conversations. It happens when a policymaker describes a new directive, the consultation process, the impact assessment, the transposition timeline, and an industry executive nods, takes notes, and says nothing. The silence is not assent. It is the recognition that the conversation has nothing to do with the reality the executive will face on Monday morning, when a competitor ships a non-conforming product from a warehouse in Hamburg and undercuts them by thirty percent.

This piece is about that silence, and what it costs.

The European Union has spent the better part of two decades building regulatory frameworks for consumer products, industrial standards, and trade remedies that are procedurally elaborate and too often practically toothless. The directives are written. The standards are harmonised. The tariffs are levied. And yet, with unsettling regularity, the same pattern emerges: compliant operators carry the full weight of compliance, bad actors absorb almost none of it, and the regulation intended to level the playing field ends up tilting it further.

The e-bike sector is the clearest case study available.

The Thesis

Regulation without enforcement is not regulation. It is a cost allocated exclusively to the compliant.

When a rule is written but not enforced, or enforced unevenly across Member States, the market does not split into “compliant” and “non-compliant”, it splits into “pays the cost” and “does not.” Over time, the second group grows. Capital flows toward it. Distribution channels adapt to it. Consumers, who do not read regulations, simply buy the cheaper product. The compliant operator is left to explain to their investors why their margin is lower than the competitor on the other side of the marketplace listing.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is the operating condition of the European e-bike industry today.

Two specific failures illustrate the mechanism. The first is a trade remedy, the 2019 anti-dumping regulation on Chinese electric bicycles. The second is a technical standard, EN 15194, the harmonised standard that defines what a “pedelec” is in European law. Both are procedurally competent. Both have been catastrophically counterproductive in practice. And they have failed for the same reason.

Case One: The Anti-Dumping Regulation That Helped Nobody

In January 2019, the European Commission imposed definitive anti-dumping and countervailing duties on electric bicycles imported from the People’s Republic of China. [1] Combined duties reached substantial levels, anti-dumping duties ranging from 10% to 70%, plus countervailing duties ranging from 4% to 17%. [2] The stated purpose was to protect the European e-bike industry from what the Commission described as injurious dumping by Chinese manufacturers benefiting from state subsidies. In January 2025, following an expiry review, the Commission extended these measures for a further five years. [3]

At the time of the original imposition, LEVA-EU, the trade association representing light electric vehicle manufacturers and importers, wrote directly to the Commission warning that the measures would raise retail prices, disproportionately harm SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), consolidate market power in the hands of a small number of large incumbents, and fail to produce the innovation gains the Commission expected. LEVA-EU’s managing director Annick Roetynck publicly described the duties at the time as “unfounded, protectionist, unfair, and absurd.” [4]

Six years later, every one of those warnings has been vindicated. And several have been exceeded.

What has actually happened since 2019:

  • Retail prices rose significantly across most of the category.
  • The overall European market contracted sharply. Germany, Europe’s largest market, saw industry turnover fall 7.7% to €5.85 billion in 2025, with total unit sales down 3.9% and retail and industry inventories still being worked down from 2023 peaks. [5] The ZIV, the German bicycle industry association, expects stock normalisation to complete only by the end of 2026. [5]
  • Small-to-medium manufacturers and importers exited the market in large numbers between 2022 and 2025, unable to absorb tariff costs while competing with larger brands on distribution scale.
  • Large European manufacturers have themselves entered severe financial distress.

These outcomes are not solely attributable to anti-dumping tariffs. The post-2022 e-bike collapse had multiple causes: pandemic-era over-ordering, a dramatic rise in financing costs for dealer inventories, the unwinding of consumer subsidies in key markets, and a generational overhang of unsold stock. But the tariffs hardened the industry structurally in precisely the wrong way, at precisely the wrong time. A protected industry that is told it no longer needs to compete on price tends, unsurprisingly, to stop investing in the disciplines that keep it competitive on everything else: product differentiation, supply chain agility, channel innovation, and service.

And then, the final irony: the tariffs are not actually working.

The Commission itself, when extending the measures in 2025, acknowledged that remaining imports of Chinese e-bikes during the review period consisted predominantly of extremely low-cost products, nearly 221,000 units at an average price of €298, compared to €790 for imports from Vietnam and €1,393 for imports from Taiwan. [2] [3] The obvious question is how products at those price points can realistically adhere to EU technical requirements: testing according to EN 15194, maintenance of technical files, CE-labelling, appointment of authorised representatives, and end-of-life battery collection obligations. The arithmetic does not accommodate both.

The enforcement gap is not a hypothesis. It is documented in a sustained, geographically distributed pattern of criminal prosecutions running for at least three years. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) has investigated at least seven major customs fraud cases involving Chinese e-bike imports between June 2023 and May 2025, spanning France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, and a multi-Member-State Porto-led investigation, alongside the larger multi-country Investigation Calypso. [6]

A non-exhaustive timeline:

  • June 2023, France: EPPO Paris arrests the manager of a group of Chinese e-bike importers for customs fraud and money laundering, with an estimated €26 million in damage to the EU budget. [6]
  • November 2023, Belgium: EPPO Brussels indicts two e-bike importers in Antwerp for customs fraud totalling €6.6 million. [6]
  • April 2024, Belgium: Convictions secured against one individual and two companies for evading €3.1 million in customs duties on imported e-bikes. [6]
  • July 2024, Italy: EPPO Milan executes a freezing order against a company suspected of customs fraud involving e-bike imports, with estimated damage of over €9.8 million. [6]
  • February 2025, Netherlands: EPPO Rotterdam directs FIOD searches in North Brabant; 25 containers identified, €1.8 million damage. The EPPO’s own statement notes that anti-dumping duties on Chinese e-bikes “can amount to up to 80% of the purchase price”, a direct admission of the economic incentive driving the circumvention. [7]
  • May 2025, multi-country: EPPO Porto leads sixteen coordinated searches across Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal in a customs fraud investigation involving Chinese e-bikes. [6]
  • June–September 2025, multi-country: Investigation Calypso, a 14-country operation, produces the largest container seizure in EU history, 2,435 containers at the port of Piraeus filled primarily with e-bikes, textiles, and footwear. Total damage estimated at €700 million. Six individuals charged including two Greek customs officers. The networks exploited Customs Procedure 42 (CP42), routing paperwork through shell companies while goods were diverted into illicit distribution. [8]

The misclassification mechanism, declaring e-bikes as goods other than e-bikes, operates in part through the structure of the HS (Harmonized System) code itself. Code 8711 60 90 90 covers “other” cycles and attracts no anti-dumping duty, while the standard e-bike code 8711 60 10 carries the full combined tariff. An adjacent customs code offering complete tariff relief on a substantially similar product is, in practical terms, a structural invitation to misclassification at scale.

Meanwhile, customs enforcement energy is directed not only at these flows but also at European assemblers. LEVA-EU has documented extended cases where companies importing bicycle components, which the Commission’s own DG Trade (Directorate-General for Trade) has confirmed in writing are not subject to anti-dumping duties when used for e-bike assembly, have nonetheless faced customs raids, financial penalties, and in some cases criminal charges, based on World Customs Organisation General Rule of Interpretation 2(a), which allows customs authorities to reclassify components as “complete” products based on subjective judgment of “essential character.” [9] European SMEs assembling e-bikes have, in documented cases, paid 48.5% anti-circumvention duties for years on components the Commission simultaneously maintained were not legally dutiable. [10]

The result is a regulatory framework that performs all of its procedural functions, duties calculated, directives transposed, standards published, while the actual market moves in the opposite direction of its stated intent. Consumers pay more for compliant products than they should. They pay less for non-compliant products than they should. Compliant European manufacturers lose on both fronts. European SMEs face aggressive enforcement; non-EU-fronted online sellers face almost none. And the Commission, institutionally, has no clear answer.

Enforcement, not prosecution

It is worth pausing on what the EPPO chronology actually means.

Each case represents a moment in which the European law enforcement apparatus, at the highest level, formally documented that the anti-dumping regime had been circumvented at scale. Each case represents customs duty evaded, VAT unpaid, and goods sold into the European market at prices a compliant European operator could not match. Each case represents months or years of investigation before the prosecution was filed.

By the time EPPO Paris arrests a manager in June 2023, the goods are already on the road. By the time EPPO Brussels indicts the Antwerp importers in November 2023, the bikes have been sold and ridden. By the time the EPPO Rotterdam case results in searches in North Brabant in February 2025, the European competitors who could not match the fraudulently-priced product have, in many cases, already gone out of business.

European Chief Prosecutor Laura Kövesi, addressing the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee in September 2024, stated the underlying problem with unusual directness:

“As long as this remains a matter for tax and customs administrations only, we allow these groups to get richer and stronger. We make it too easy for them: if they get caught, they pay a fine, create a new company and carry on. We all have to recognize this: administrative tools are not enough to combat tax fraud. We need criminal law.” [11]

The EPPO’s 2025 annual report quantifies what this means at scale. By the end of 2025 the Office was investigating 3,602 active cases, an increase of 35% over 2024, with estimated total damage of €67.27 billion to EU and national budgets, nearly triple the previous year’s figure of €24.8 billion. Customs and VAT fraud account for €45 billion of this damage. Kövesi describes this as fraud “reshaping the criminal ecosystem in the EU.” [12]

This is the weight of evidence. The criminal law response to circumvention is necessary and the EPPO is doing serious work. But criminal prosecution is, by design, a response to harm already done. It cannot resurrect a Belgian importer pushed into liquidation. It cannot rebuild a German specialist retailer who closed for lack of margin. It cannot return market share to the Dutch assembler who paid the duty while a competitor declared the same goods under a different HS code.

Compliant businesses are not just damaged by circumvention. Some of them are killed by it.

The lesson is not that the EU needs more prosecutions. The lesson is that the regulatory architecture must prevent the circumvention from succeeding in the first place. Enforcement must be designed in. Prosecution after the fact is, for the compliant operator who has already gone under, justice without remedy.

This is the central design failure of European industrial regulation as currently practised: it produces directives, tariffs, and standards on a procedural timetable, then leaves the question of practical enforcement to a downstream system that, however competent, cannot move at the speed of the harm.

Case Two: The 250 Watt Fiction

If the anti-dumping failure is about the gap between policy and enforcement, EN 15194 (the European standard for Electrically Power Assisted Cycles) is about the gap between a standard and the physics it claims to regulate.

Under European law, specifically, Article 2(2)(h) of Regulation (EU) No 168/2013, a “pedelec” is excluded from vehicle type approval if it meets three conditions: the motor must cut out when the cyclist stops pedalling; the motor output must be progressively reduced and cut off before the vehicle reaches 25 km/h; and the motor’s continuous rated power must not exceed 250 W. [13] The harmonised technical standard that defines how all of this is tested, EN 15194, currently in its 2017+A1:2023 revision, applies the 250 W figure as a continuous rated power measurement. [14]

That last number is the one that has, quietly, become a regulatory fiction.

“Continuous rated power” in EN 15194 is measured at thermal equilibrium under controlled laboratory conditions. The test measures what the motor can sustain indefinitely without overheating. It does not measure peak power. It does not measure power delivered for thirty seconds on a 12% gradient. It does not measure the power being delivered to a cargo bike carrying 250 kilograms of freight up a bridge ramp. It measures one specific thermal scenario, in one specific laboratory condition, and calls the resulting number “the power of the motor.”

Any competent drive unit engineer can design around this.

The industry has. Advanced thermal management, aluminium housings and bike frames acting as heat sinks, software-based thermal throttling, transient over-current permissions, regenerative cooling during coasting, allows a motor to comfortably pass the 250 W continuous test while delivering sustained real-world power that is a multiple of that figure.

Publicly documented examples are available across every major drive-unit manufacturer, European, Japanese, and Chinese, all of them CE-compliant, all of them legally marketed as 250 W pedelec drive units. All complying to 250 W continuous rated power in lab conditions while delivering peak power of 800 W or more. This is not a loophole being quietly exploited by a few players, it is the ordinary operating condition of the entire category.

Three-wheeled cargo e-bikes exist in the European market with a manufacturer-specified maximum total weight of 600 kilograms, roughly the gross weight of a small passenger car, sold and legally marketed as 250 W pedelecs.

The arithmetic is straightforward: you cannot move 600 kilograms up European urban terrain on 250 watts of mechanical power. The motor is delivering substantially more. The standard simply does not measure it.

Let’s be clear about what this means and what it does not mean. These manufacturers are not breaking any rules. The problem is not the manufacturers. The problem is a standard that claims to regulate motor power and actually regulates thermal behaviour under laboratory conditions.

The consequences:

  • Competitive distortion. A manufacturer who designs a drive unit that genuinely delivers 250 W of real-world power is competing against units that deliver two, three, or four times that, all carrying the same legal label.
  • Safety ambiguity. A 600-watt real-world vehicle behaves differently in traffic, brakes differently, accelerates differently, and crashes differently than a 250-watt one. Regulators setting rules for cycling infrastructure, helmet requirements, and road rights are working from a number that does not reflect the vehicles they are actually regulating.
  • Convergence with motorcycle categories. Regulation (EU) No 168/2013 (on the approval and market surveillance of two- or three-wheel vehicles and quadricycles) already establishes the L1e-A category (powered cycle, up to 1000 W, up to 25 km/h) and L1e-B category (moped, up to 4000 W, up to 45 km/h), both of which use maximum power ratings rather than continuous thermal ratings. [15] [16] The e-bike category is the outlier, using a measurement methodology that no other powered vehicle category relies on.
  • Consumer confusion. The rider of a 600 W cargo bike is told they are operating a “250 W bicycle” and treats it accordingly. Insurance products, liability frameworks, and urban planning assumptions all inherit this mismatch.

The fix is not radical. It is obvious. The e-bike category needs a maximum power standard, modelled on the L1e-A framework, that measures peak output under realistic load conditions. The 250 W figure either needs to be redefined as a maximum (which would make many current products non-compliant) or replaced with a higher, honestly-measured maximum that reflects what the industry is actually selling.

What cannot continue is the current situation, in which a core parameter of European mobility law is understood, inside the industry, to be a number that does not describe the product.

The Common Pattern

These two cases look different on the surface. One is trade policy; one is technical standardisation. One is about foreign competition; one is about domestic product classification. But they fail for the same reason.

In both cases, the European regulatory apparatus produced a procedurally correct output, a tariff structure, a harmonised standard, and then walked away from the question of whether the output would actually achieve its stated purpose in the market.

The anti-dumping regulation assumed that duties at the customs border would translate into a level playing field. It did not anticipate, and has not adapted to, the reality of direct-to-consumer e-commerce and deliberate tariff-code misclassification.

EN 15194 assumed that a laboratory thermal measurement would serve as a meaningful proxy for real-world motor power. It did not anticipate, and has not adapted to, the sophistication of modern drive unit engineering.

In both cases, the gap between the regulation and the reality was pointed out, by industry, by trade associations, by independent technical experts, before the rules came into force. In both cases, the warnings were acknowledged and set aside in favour of the procedural timetable. And in both cases, the people who bear the cost of the gap are the compliant European operators the regulations were ostensibly designed to protect.

This is the harmful business environment. It is not hostile to industry in the abstract. It is hostile specifically to the compliant industry, to the manufacturer who invests in conformity assessment, the importer who pays the duties, the dealer who stocks the certified product. Non-compliance is not punished; it is, in practice, a competitive advantage.

What Meaningful Enforcement Would Actually Look Like

Critique without recommendation is self-indulgent. If the current system is failing, what should replace it?

On trade remedies and market surveillance:

  1. Enforcement must be preventive, not prosecutorial. The European Chief Prosecutor’s investigations are necessary, but they arrive after compliant operators have already been driven out of business. The regulatory architecture must prevent circumvention from succeeding at scale, not rely on criminal prosecution to recover damages once the harm is done.
  2. Duty enforcement must move from the border to the point of sale. Marketplace platforms operating in the EU must be made jointly and severally liable for the customs and conformity status of goods sold through their infrastructure to European consumers. The Digital Services Act provides a legal foundation; it needs to be extended to cover anti-dumping duty compliance and product conformity.
  3. HS code misclassification must be treated as the systemic problem it is. The fact that hundreds of thousands of units under HS 8711 60 90 90 face no anti-dumping or countervailing duty while essentially similar products under 8711 60 10 face up to 70% duty is an invitation to fraud that the Commission has left standing for years. Customs tariff code structures must be reviewed for systemic circumvention risk at the same cadence as the duties themselves.
  4. Market surveillance authorities need resources proportional to the problem. The current per-Member-State budget for product market surveillance, in most countries, is a rounding error compared to the annual volume of non-conforming goods entering those markets. Funding must increase by an order of magnitude, or the function must be centralised at EU level under a single enforcement body with operational capacity. The European Chief Prosecutor’s call for dedicated, specialised investigators in every participating Member State should be supported and extended to customs and market surveillance.
  5. Penalties must exceed the economic benefit of non-compliance. If the expected fine for selling a non-conforming e-bike is lower than the margin captured by doing so, the rational actor will continue selling. Penalty frameworks need to be calibrated to turnover of the non-compliant product, not to nominal fixed amounts.
  6. Enforcement resources must stop disproportionately targeting compliant European SMEs. When customs authorities devote more energy to reclassifying parts imports from documented EU assemblers than to investigating misclassified direct imports from non-EU marketplaces, the enforcement priorities have inverted.
  7. The compliant operator needs a rewarded status. Conformity should carry visible, commercially meaningful advantages, expedited customs clearance, reduced administrative burden, preferential access to public procurement. Compliance should not merely avoid punishment; it should produce measurable competitive benefit.

On EN 15194 specifically:

  1. Replace “continuous rated power” with “maximum rated power” as the defining parameter. Harmonise the measurement methodology with L1e-A, which already uses peak power ratings and is technically mature.
  2. Raise the numerical limit to reflect real-world product. A maximum power ceiling in the range of 500–750 W for standard pedelecs, and a separate, higher ceiling (1000–1500 W) for cargo and heavy-duty variants, would align the legal category with what the market is actually producing. Sub-250 W would become a genuine performance category, not the default label for everything that passes a thermal test.
  3. Introduce mandatory declaration of both peak and continuous power, with both figures visible on the product specification and in marketing material. Consumer and regulator should see what they are actually looking at.
  4. Set a transition period, not a cliff edge. Revising the standard without destroying the current installed base requires a phased compliance window, existing products can remain on market for a defined period, new homologations immediately adopt the new methodology.

On the broader philosophy:

The EU Commission should adopt, as a formal principle of industrial regulation, the proposition that a rule that cannot be enforced should not be written. Procedural completion is not the purpose of the regulatory function. Measurable effect in the market is the purpose. A directive that has been transposed in all twenty-seven Member States but is being ignored by the actual participants in the market is a failure, regardless of how many consultations preceded it.

Closing

The European industrial base does not need protection from competition. It needs protection from a regulatory environment that punishes compliance and rewards evasion.

The e-bike sector is not unique in facing this problem. It is simply further along the curve.

The same pattern is visible in biodiesel. In July 2024 the Commission imposed preliminary anti-dumping duties of 12.8% to 36.4% on Chinese biodiesel and HVO, after 2023 imports of 1.87 million tonnes (around 14% of total European consumption) forced European producers to shut down plants and cancel new projects. The listed German biofuels producer VERBIO, welcoming the measures, stated publicly in its corporate disclosure that the imports had been “likely deliberately misdeclared as waste-based”, structurally identical to the HS-code misclassification seen in the e-bike sector. VERBIO went further: it warned that anti-dumping duties alone were a temporary fix and that the durable solution required comprehensive control and sanction measures outside the EU, because enforcement at the European border had proven insufficient. [17] The same diagnosis, from a different sector, from a publicly-listed industrial operator, in the same year.

The pattern is also visible at scale across the European economy as a whole. The EPPO’s 2025 annual report estimates €67.27 billion in active fraud cases, nearly triple the prior year, with €45 billion concentrated in customs and VAT fraud. The Chief Prosecutor herself has stated that this fraud is “reshaping the criminal ecosystem in the EU.” [12] The pattern is emerging in battery regulation, in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, in the AI Act’s early implementation, and in the Digital Product Passport rollout. In each case, the procedural machinery is running on schedule. In each case, the compliant operator is being loaded with cost. In each case, the question of whether the rule actually changes behaviour in the market is treated as someone else’s problem.

It is not someone else’s problem. It is the central problem. And until the European Commission and the Member States are willing to treat enforcement as a first-order design constraint, not as an afterthought to be resolved through later prosecution, the harmful business environment will continue to do exactly what it is structured to do: close down compliant operators, consolidate market power in the least innovative incumbents, and hand the consumer market to whoever is least reachable by European law.

The rules, as currently designed, reward the wrong players.

That can be fixed. But not by writing more rules, and not by hoping that prosecutors will repair the damage afterwards.

About the Author

My name is Arno Saladin. I have been a bike enthusiast from the moment I learned how to ride one. I was the secretary of the EEVC (European Enhanced Vehicle-Safety Committee) WG10 that drafted Directive 2003/102/EC (protection of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users before and in the event of a collision with a motor vehicle), I was an active member of LEVA-EU, and I launched the first L1e-A pedelec and the first L1e-B cargo e-trike in Europe. Very early in my career I had the honour to become Product Manager, Power Assist Systems, at Yamaha Motor Europe. Yamaha Motor is the inventor of the modern-day e-bike and I was deeply involved in the launch of this new technology in Europe in the late 1990s. More recently I was Vice President at Rad Power Bikes and responsible for the European market. Rad Power Bikes became the e-bike market leader in North America in the late 2010s.

Throughout my career I have had to deal with ever-changing regulations and standards. At Yamaha we struggled with the lack of specific e-bike regulations and standards. At Rad Power Bikes we struggled with vehicle classification, law enforcement not understanding regulations, insurance companies unwilling to insure certain vehicle types, last-mile delivery companies that demanded conflicting specifications of high capacity and high performance while fitting in the 250 W category, European anti-dumping regulations, circumvention, country-of-origin uncertainties, anti-tampering and compliance, to name a few. Some of these offered opportunities, and most of them required more investment, led to longer go-to-market time, limited innovation, and increased cost and risk.

This article deals with two specific challenges I have faced, and many with me, in the European e-bike markets.

References

[1] Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/73 of 17 January 2019 imposing a definitive anti-dumping duty and definitively collecting the provisional duty imposed on imports of electric bicycles originating in the People’s Republic of China. Official Journal of the European Union. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02019R0073-20190118

[2] European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade, “EU extends duties on electric bicycles from China,” 24 January 2025. https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/news/eu-extends-duties-electric-bicycles-china-2025-01-24_en

[3] Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/120 of 23 January 2025 imposing a definitive anti-dumping duty on imports of electric bicycles, originating in the People’s Republic of China following an expiry review. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2025/120/oj/eng

[4] Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, “EU imposes stiff anti-dumping duties on Chinese e-bikes,” 18 January 2019. https://www.bicycleretailer.com/international/2019/01/18/eu-imposes-stiff-anti-dumping-duties-chinese-e-bikes

[5] ZIV – Zweirad-Industrie-Verband (German Bicycle Industry), “Resilient despite headwinds: bicycle industry stable in 2025 – new business areas lend strength,” press release, 11 March 2026. https://www.ziv-zweirad.de/en/2026/03/11/market-data-2025/; full data: https://www.ziv-zweirad.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Market-Data-Bicycle-Industry-2025.pdf

[6] EPPO chronology of major Chinese e-bike customs fraud investigations, June 2023 – May 2025:

[7] European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), “Netherlands: EPPO investigates fraudulent import of e-bikes from China,” Luxembourg, 26 February 2025. https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news/netherlands-eppo-investigates-fraudulent-import-e-bikes-china

[8] European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), “Investigation ‘Calypso’: EPPO strikes criminal networks flooding EU with fraudulent Chinese imports,” Luxembourg, 26 June 2025. https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news/investigation-calypso-eppo-strikes-criminal-networks-flooding-eu-fraudulent-chinese; follow-up: “Investigation Calypso: More than 2 400 shipping containers seized at port of Piraeus,” 15 September 2025. https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news/investigation-calypso-more-2-400-shipping-containers-seized-port-piraeus

[9] LEVA-EU, “EU Extends Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bike Parts Despite Severe Impact on European E-Bike Assemblers,” 27 October 2025. https://leva-eu.com/eu-extends-anti-dumping-duties-on-chinese-bike-parts-despite-severe-impact-on-european-e-bike-assemblers/

[10] Cycling Industry News, “Anti-dumping confusion as LEVA-EU receives new word on eBike parts,” 21 November 2022. https://cyclingindustry.news/anti-dumping-confusion-as-leva-eu-receives-new-word-on-ebike-parts/

[11] Speech of European Chief Prosecutor Laura Kövesi at the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), Brussels, 30 September 2024 (published 1 October 2024). https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news/speech-european-chief-prosecutor-laura-kovesi-libe-committee

[12] European Public Prosecutor’s Office, “Customs and VAT fraud are reshaping the criminal ecosystem in the EU, with €45 billion in estimated damage uncovered by EPPO,” news release accompanying the EPPO Annual Report 2025, 2 March 2026. https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news/customs-and-vat-fraud-are-reshaping-criminal-ecosystem-eu-eu45-billion-estimated; full report: https://www.eppo.europa.eu/assets/annual-report-2025/index.html

[13] Regulation (EU) No 168/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 January 2013 on the approval and market surveillance of two- or three-wheel vehicles and quadricycles, Article 2(2)(h). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2013/168/oj/eng

[14] EN 15194:2017+A1:2023 — Cycles. Electrically power assisted cycles. EPAC Bicycles. European Committee for Standardisation. Summary: https://standards.iteh.ai/catalog/standards/cen/c9b5ac0f-0728-4674-b9ab-73f4bb33f932/en-15194-2017

[15] Regulation (EU) No 168/2013, Annex I — vehicle category definitions for L1e-A (powered cycle: max. continuous rated power 1000 W, max. design speed 25 km/h) and L1e-B (two-wheel moped: max. continuous rated power 4000 W, max. design speed 45 km/h). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32013R0168

[16] Zemo Partnership, “EU Regulation on the Approval of L-Category Vehicles” — summary sheet of Regulation (EU) No 168/2013. https://www.zemo.org.uk/assets/presentations/EU%20Regulation%20on%20the%20Approval%20of%20L-Category%20Vehicles.pdf

[17] VERBIO SE, “Verbio welcomes the preliminary results of anti-dumping proceedings,” corporate news release, Leipzig, 22 July 2024. https://www.verbio.de/en/investor-relations/corporate-news/article/verbio-welcomes-the-preliminary-results-of-anti-dumping-proceedings/

Last updated: April 2026. All URLs verified as of publication date.