Road transport authorizations will be issued to road transport operators and enterprises in Moldova only for the involved eligible pool in a move to exclude the units of transport that are not engaged in international traffic from the process of issuing authorizations. This is provided in a bill that was approved by Cabinet on September 15, IPN reports.

By the same bill, the obligation to use international road transport authorizations within 30 days of the issuing was excluded. The obligation for the road transport operator to restore the authorization within 90 days of the issuing if this is not used was yet maintained.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Spînu, Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development, the bill is aimed at stopping corruption in international freight transport. A broadly used scheme was the introduction in the truck pool of other units of transport that weren’t really used in international freight traffic and the number of such units and of recipients of more authorizations was artificially increased this way.

By another scheme, cars not included in international traffic were leased out and those who rented them got more annual or one-off authorizations. Now, no company will be able to get more than ten one-off authorizations and to receive others before the expiry of the previous ones.

Currently, the National Agency of Road Transport issues so-called CEMTs that are annual authorizations for international freight transport and one-off authorizations for countries with which Moldova has bilateral agreements in this field. A quota of 1,576 annual authorizations and over 135,000 one-off authorizations is now available. But the demand is much greater. About 4,600 trucks are actually involved in freight transport.