At a session of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Economic Affairs, Deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Armen Simonyan announced that fines and penalties imposed on around 5,000 licensed taxi drivers will be pardoned.
The change will be introduced through an amendment to the Law on State Duty, eliminating obligations that had accumulated due to unpaid state duties, Sputnik Armenia reported.
According to Simonyan, the amendments concern individual taxi drivers who operated legally with licenses between 2015 and 2019. The issue arose because, although state duties for taxi drivers were abolished in June 2015, requirements for their payment remained in place.
By 2019, state duty regulations for licensing individual taxi drivers were officially annulled, yet the activity was still treated as subject to licensing. During this period, around 10,000 people received licenses, and about 5,000 of them accumulated obligations of roughly 1.3 billion drams, including about 400 million drams in penalties.
The deputy minister emphasized that drivers operating legally bore a financial burden, while those who drove without licenses had already benefited from amnesties on their penalties. This imbalance led to the need for a new amnesty.
The draft law received unanimous approval in the committee and has been placed on the agenda of the National Assembly’s upcoming plenary session.
On July 31, the government already decided to pardon about 1.342 billion drams in debts accumulated by taxi drivers.
