Fedex slow delivery, lost shipment nightmare

This is not the first time that I have problems with FedEx Sweden

My shipment from abroad (US) arrived at the sorting facility on 17 December.

On 19 December it had progressed to the customs office, but... No-one from FedEx called me to advise that I needed to pay for VAT so that the shipment could be cleared and delivered to me.

On 26 December I discovered that the shipment had arrived so I paid for VAT.

One week passed and I was starting to get annoyed so I called Fedex.I told the helpdesk-person about the issue and he replied that "Apparently they had no record of that VAT had been paid" and I was asked to show some proof of the transaction (wich I did).

Said and done, he said that it should be taken care of and that he would be in touch.

One more week passed and still not a word from fedex, so I tried to mail them... several times.

No reply whatsoever.

Several more weeks passed in this manner, no reply on mail, and just sheepish "helpdeskpeople" on the phone trying to convince me that the delivery is on it's way.

Now (3 months after the original "delivery date")

they acknowledge that they have lost the package somwhere between exiting the customs and arriving at the sorting facility. Now it should have been rather hard to just loose a package that size (about 130x50x50 cm) but i guess some of the fedex drivers are rather skilled at "loosing" packages...

Right now I'm just hoping that I get compensated.

Avoid FedEX at all cost!