Siarhei Balykin: Minsk State Executive Committee reverted registration back to early 90s

The abolition of registration in district administration centers has led to huge queues in the Minsk State Executive Committee.

Recently the situation attracted the attention of the Ministry of Justice. It turned out that unlike other regions Minsk witnesses the decline of registered economic players. According to the Ministry of Justice, this negative trend is caused by the decision to abolish the possibility to register economic players in regions and concentrate it in the only state body - Minsk State Executive Committee.

Siarhei Balykin, a lawyer and the head of the Association of Small and Medium Business, in the talk with the EuroBelarus Information Service noted that the current situation can be compared to the situation in the early 90s.

“It has been long since I have seen such enormously large queues. Well, nominally, the procedure remains the same:either juridical entities or individual entrepreneurs are registered within several minutes and the certificate of registration is issued the next day. But in order to visit the specialist they had to wait for a month or even longer. However, in regions the procedure can be registered as quickly as before, i.e. in a day or two”, - Siarhei Balykin says.

According to the lawyer, the legislation applied in regions remains unchanged. “Thus, it is a logistic problem and it is hidden in the Administration of Justice of the Minsk State Executive Committee. I believe that the decision to reduce the number of specialists who are involved in registration procedure was completely wrong, - Siarhei Balykin says. – As quick registration permits to increase the number of economic entities, which means that part of them starts working and supplement the budget with taxes. And secondly, registration is levied with state duty; and the money received from it can easily be used for the required specialists. However, it appears that we lose some part of business and spoil our investment appeal due to the problems with logistics”.

Besides, notices Balykin, “it hits not only business, as Minsk State Executive Committee registers NGOs (such as initiations, unions and associations) as well. Thus, we can see how one unreasonable decision has a negative impact in many directions at once”.