The shortage of blank IDs was overcome. The tender contest was won by a Polish public company that produces passports for citizens of Poland as well. The director of the Public Services Agency Mircea Eșanu assured that the new supplier is credible and now that the earlier applied royalty payment was excluded, the costs associated with ID making will decrease, IPN reports.
The Agency’s director noted that no delays exist in the issuing of passports and this problem will be soon solved in the case of the other papers too. The ID making costs will decline.
“There is no delay as regards the passports. There is a large number of people who come to our offices and receive papers according to the regime in which they ordered them. We do not have shortages of blank passports. As regards the other types of IDs, such as identity cards, driver’s licenses and technical passports, we are close to doing away with this discomfort that was generated by this scheme as we aimed to get rid of the royalty payments that were applied on these papers too. The passports were more evident in this scheme because a tax of €13.6 was collected on them. In the case of the other papers, the royalty payment was not so large, being of €1.6,” Mircea Eșanu stated in the program “Black Box” on TV8 channel.
According to him, the new supplier will ship several hundred thousand blank IDs by the end of November so that all the citizens who applied for papers could be issued with these without delay.
“We had a tender contest to choose a supplier of passports, which was held transparently and correctly. We now have a credible supplier. This is a Polios public company. It is the company that makes passports for Poland and for another 5-6 states. It is a company managed by the Ministry of Finance of Poland. In total, we will save at least €14-15 per passport. The same company, since the second half of October, will supply blank papers for the other IDs. In October, we will receive the first part of 60,000 blank IDs from the Polish company. A new lot of 200,000 papers will be shipped in November and the situation will be normalized. We apologize to the citizens for this discomfort but we cannot allow a scheme to be perpetuated,” stated the head of the Public Service Agency.
Several months ago, the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office started a criminal case over considerable money laundering. The money was gained following the purchase of blank passports from a Lithuanian company.
