Not my port and I have never cleared into Kenya, so this is a view from the exporting end, which may be the useful part. From where I sit in Cork, a request like this arrives as an email from a consignee asking for a paper my team has never been told to produce. Nothing in our process creates it for a shipment that left before the rule existed, and with cold chain stock that is exactly the box that sits on a quay while someone looks.
So the practical question for me is whether the exporter can still obtain a copy after the fact. If the export was lodged at origin by an agent, a late copy of what was actually filed is a very different thing from a document made up afterwards, and I would want the file to say which it was. If the exporter's side never lodged anything in that form, I would not want to be the one who invented it.
I have not seen what an officer accepts, and I would not guess. Has any agent you know tried a commercial invoice with a covering note, and did anyone get the answer on paper rather than at the counter? Or am I overthinking a problem that will quietly settle itself by the time the July cargo is cleared?
One field in the list settles the invoice question. As reported, the declaration must carry the reference number issued by the exporting country's customs. A commercial invoice cannot carry that, whatever the covering note says.
But for the July box the paper usually exists. Someone lodged it to get the goods out. As a parallel only: in Brazil the export sits on a DU-E in the Portal Unico, and the exporter can still pull a simplified PDF extract of it after the fact. That is a copy of what was filed, not a document made up afterwards.
The waiver, as reported, is for countries whose customs issues no declaration at all. Not for cargo that left early.
I sit at the exporting end in Izmir, where a July box would have left on a declaration lodged electronically in our customs system, BILGE. So I agree with you that the paper exists. The detour I would add is about what kind of copy travels to Mombasa months later.
The thing I would worry about is the printout. Our customs directorate has said in writing that printouts from the system have been found to differ from the record, they can be edited, and officers are told to work from the system, not the paper. So a PDF that turns up after the fact is only as good as the reference number on it and the exporter's willingness to stand behind it.
What I would ask a Turkish seller for is the declaration reference, a copy pulled fresh by their broker, and one line saying it matches the filed version. Whether Kenya accepts it, I cannot tell you.