At the end of last week, information about a tender appeared in the "Bulletin of State Procurement".
According to the terms of the purchase, one license plate for a passenger car, commercial passenger transport, vehicles of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and diplomatic cars will cost 135 UAH. For a trailer, the price was 67.5 UAH, for a motorcycle — 52.2 UAH, and for a moped — 18.6 UAH. These amounts include VAT and are given per piece.
It is noteworthy that back in July, the head of the department for organizing registration and examination work of the traffic police department, Alexander Demyanko, promised that next year a full set of plates would cost 80 UAH. However, if we focus on procurement prices, the driver will have to pay 270 UAH for a set, which is almost 3.5 times higher than the previously announced amount.
Interestingly, a high-ranking traffic police officer could well have been aware of the future prices of "Fort" — the tender documentation files with prices are dated back to February 14.
Nevertheless, it is not about "spinning" 40 million within the ministry, as it might seem at first glance. The purchase was carried out under the procedure of procurement from a single supplier. The justification states that this procedure was chosen due to the fact that the KSPA "Fort" has a patent for the industrial design "License plate of vehicles". This patent certificate was received by the association on December 10, 2010.
It is worth noting that this patent is not the first for "Fort" in this field. Back on February 5, 2010, a group of authors — director of "Fort" Viktor Pisarenko, commercial director Ivan Slobodyanyuk, chief designer Petro Zayats, as well as Dmitry Dmitriev and Yulia Sukhomlina — filed an application for patenting the industrial design of a license plate for all types and models of mopeds. The patent was issued on June 25.
On October 8, 2010, Viktor Pisarenko filed another application — for a patent for seven variants of vehicle license plates, ranging from moped plates to blue plates for vehicles of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was issued on December 10, but not solely: the co-author was Jacek Stefan Wojciechowski, who heads the Polish company UTAL sp. z o.o. — a medium-sized enterprise located near Poznan and specializing in the production of license plates.
The Polish company's portal describes in detail the entire process of creating plates: "The production of license plates is a process, the key stage of which is covering the aluminum tape with reflective film. Then, numbers are applied to the clean plate by stamping. Then the finished plates are covered with thermal transfer film."
There is also an image that makes it clear where ready-made car plates, or at least blanks or aluminum tape for their production, may come to Ukraine in 2013.
By the way, on the official website of "Fort" there is not a word about the production of license plates or even information plates — it features pistols, rifles, cartridges, special means and "consumer goods", which mean ordinary safes. The UTAL website is noticeably different in this regard.
Let us add that in 2011 and this year, the same KSPA "Fort" was engaged in the supply of license plates. As reported by the website "Nashi Groshi", at the beginning of 2011, 133.7 million UAH was transferred from the budget to the association for these purposes, and at the end of the same year — another 21.59 million UAH.
