The Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) proposes that the control over ships registered in the Republic of Moldova should be ensured only by societies that are recognized by the European Commission. In this regard, the PAS will propose a bill to amend the Code of Commercial Maritime Navigation. The party also considers the cost of registering ships should be substantially increased, IPN reports.

PAS MP Radu Marian in a press briefing said these measures will discourage those with bad intentions. He called on the MPs to support the proposed changes.

Radu Marian noted that Moldova has over 300 ships registered under its colors, while Romania, which has hundreds of kilometers of access to the sea, has only up to ten commercial ships. “The ships with Moldovan registration numbers are used by traffickers in human beings to transport over 2,000 refugees from the Middle East to the EU countries,” added the MP.

He related that in October 2019, 1 tonne of cocaine was found on a ship sailing under the Moldovan colors. In November 2019, a ship that sails illegally under Moldova’s colors was wrecked in Odessa and caused an ecological disaster there. In 2013, a ship under the Moldovan colors that was transporting 2,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate was stopped and sequestrated in Beirut owing to technical faults.

The situation is so serious that Moldova has been during many years on the international maritime blacklist. These ships are sequestrated, stopped and inspected very frequently. The average age of vessels registered during the past two years is 33 years.

The PAS MP said that as a result of a request made to the Naval Agency three weeks ago, he received a response saying that the ships that were to be registered weren’t somehow inspected because there are no regulations to this effect. These ships are registered without being examined because their registration is very profitable. The taxes levied by the state officially are very low, about 20,000 lei for a ship weighing 5,000 tonnes, for example. “The unofficial tax or bribe is definitely much higher,” stated Radu Marian.

The MP also said that the regulations actually allow heaven on earth for smugglers and offenders from all over the world. The legislation allows registering vessels of any age or those that are on the UN’s and EU’s sanctions lists.