After solving the mystery about sce-import failing (see different thread), I got back to business and tried
sce-import -c ssh
expecting to find "openssh-client" among the search results. However, the list only contains "openssh-server" and 17 more packages, all whose name begins with "ssh". Issueing
sce-import openssh-client
results in "Do you want to import openssh-client?:" as expected.
So it seems that the 'c'-option does not seem to work as expected.