The January 25 governmental decision on implementation of the automatic information system, which obliges pharmacies to pay 36 million lei for what the Small Business Association describes as „useless” modernisation will make small pharmacies go bankrupt and will increase the prices of medications. The chairman of the Small Business Association, Eugen Roscovan, told a news conference on Tuesday, March 28, that the developers of the decision concerned followed a hidden goal and notably to carry out a marketing study on account of pharmacies, in order to create new pharmacies and to destroy the small ones. „At the same time, the Ministry of Information Technologies and Ministry of Health and Social Protection, developers of this draft, aim to monopolise the pharmaceutical market and to raise additional financial resources. The implementation of this system contravenes to the law on commercial secret,” Roscovan warned. The manager of the pharmacy Rubus-Farm SRL, Vitalie Capcelea, told the same conference that the soft imposed to pharmacies requires the issuing of bills and information about name of medications, dose, and recipes prescribed by doctors, etc. „The introduction of this information requires additional efforts and time from pharmacists. In addition, most of employees of pharmacies are aged 35-40 years and they will hardly learn the information processing procedure. Thus, a patient will be served within 10 minutes, compared with 3-4 minutes at present and people will queue and will choose large pharmaceutical networks. This is a tool to monopolise the market with state pharmaceutical networks.” Capcelea gave the example of some developed countries, where „the state is concerned to protect the small business and it exists due to this support.” He noted that this situation in Moldova is reverse, as the state protects the interests of large producers and disfavours small enterprises. „Small pharmacies will have to close up, the competition which is an important factor in a market economy will disappear, while prices of drugs will increase by minimum 30-40 percent,” Capcelea feared. If the government considers that this programme is so important, it should test it at least 2-3 years in order to identify eventual deficiencies of its implementation, economic effects, so that to be able to argue the need of such a programme later,” the Rubus-Farm SRL manager added. The director of another pharmacy Linaria Prim SRL, Elena Vasileva, said that the decision calls for installation of new programmes for free, but the Drug Agency has offered semi-finished versions instead of ready programmes and they do not ensure the functioning of the programme. She noted that the installation of softs will make pharmacies spend about 370 dollars for the first job and 80 dollars for every additional job, while an hour of consultation costs 40 dollars. Also, Elena Vasileva said that pharmacies must purchase computers, scanners, cash registers, etc. besides expenses related to installation of this programme. „Small pharmacies are incapable to afford such huge expenses and they have to go bankrupt.” She noted that the label with latent band for every product, which is introduced by the same decision, is absolutely useless. These labels will not influence the quality of drugs, but they will increase the product by at least 0.26 lei. The programme offers nothing but difficulties, Vasileva added. There are about 2,000 small pharmacies with 16,000 employees in Moldova.