All transport permits are allocated on an open and transparent basis. This position of the Ministry of Transport was announced at a meeting between the First Deputy Minister of Transport and Communications, Aleksei Lyakhnovich, and the Head of the Department of Road and Urban Passenger Transport, Sergei Dubina, with carriers on the issue of allocating permits for freight transport to Poland, BELTA reports with reference to the ministry's website.
Permits are issued in the order determined by the rules of road freight transport, the instructions on the procedure for allocating, issuing and using permits, and the minutes of the meetings of the Commission of the Ministry of Transport and Communications for the allocation of permits.
"The instructions provide for uniform approaches to the allocation of permits, regardless of the category of the road carrier – a legal entity or an individual entrepreneur, a small or medium-sized enterprise. The influence of the human factor in the allocation is excluded. All permits are allocated on an open and transparent basis, and the results are posted on the website of the Transport Inspectorate," the Ministry of Transport noted.
Due to the fact that there are fewer permits than the demand for them, not everyone is satisfied with the allocation results. This has now happened with regard to permits for transport to Poland. "But if the situation had been left as it was in 2019, then next year Polish permits could have run out as early as September-October 2020," the Ministry of Transport believes.
For the first quarter of 2020, out of 1865 business entities that wanted to obtain Polish permits, they were issued to 1243 carriers. These carriers, based on the results of nine months of 2019, generated 85.5% of Belarus's total revenue from international road freight transport. At the same time, 622 carriers, who were not included in the allocation, generated revenue of 3.7% of the total volume.
"The efficiency of carriers not included in the allocation, per vehicle per month, is 5.8 times lower than that of those to whom Polish permits were issued (average revenue of 1 thousand euros per vehicle per month versus 5.8 thousand euros per month)," the ministry provided data.
Of the 1243 carriers who received Polish permits, 96% are organisations and individual entrepreneurs with no more than 30 vehicles, 52% are carriers with no more than five vehicles, and only 1% are organisations with more than 100 vehicles.
In 2019, three meetings of the Belarusian-Polish Mixed Commission on International Road Transport were held, during which the final quota of permits for international road freight transport for 2019 was discussed. The request of the Belarusian side for additional permits for freight transport in the current year was not satisfied by the Polish side.
The only agreement reached was to transfer a portion of the agreed preliminary quota for 2020 of bilateral/transit permits (10,000 permits of the 2020 sample) to the Belarusian side, with the possibility of their use in December 2019.
However, negotiations with the Polish side on providing Belarusian carriers with a sufficient number of permits will continue. The next negotiations at the ministerial level of the two states on this issue are scheduled for April 2020.