City Council asks central authorities to place moratorium on outlawing entrepreneur patents

The Chisinau City Council will make an appeal to the Government and Parliament of Moldova to place a moratorium on the Law no. 208 prohibiting entrepreneur patents. The moratorium in place, the City Council plans to engage the civil society, local and central authorities, and patentees in public debates to find a solution to the problem. The decision was approved at Thursday’s sitting of the Council on the proposal of the leader of the Social-Democrat faction, Eduard Musuc. He stated that the local authorities are in full solidarity with the grievances of the patent holders operating in the municipality of Chisinau. In his words, besides the social impact of this law on the city, given the impossibility for nearly 10,000 people to earn their living, the city coffers will miss revenues of tens of millions of lei, which the municipality will not be able to use for solving its problems. Musuc pointed out that, according the City Finance Department and the Tax Inspectorate, patent holders could have transferred some 20 million lei in taxes to the municipal budget had it not been for the respective law. The Social-Democrat leader further stated that following numerous raids at the marketplaces across the city, the former patent holders reorganised into individual enterprises got fines of 6000 lei for not using cash registers. Musuc says that the fines and the penalties for making late payments due to shortage of cash pose great risks to small businesses.