Two to five years in prison – this will be the punishment for illegal transportation of passengers, parliament decided today. This was done with an amendment to the Penal Code during the transitional and final provisions of the Merchant Shipping Code.
According to the amendment, whoever performs public transport of passengers without a permit, license or registration, which are required by a normative act or an act of the European Union, shall be punished by imprisonment. In addition, the motor vehicle will be confiscated in favor of the state, regardless of who owns it.
If a forged document or one with false content is used, the punishment will be from five to ten years in prison, as well as a fine of up to BGN 15,000. In addition, confiscation of property is again envisaged.
The opposition, represented by the BSP, strongly objected to the adopted amendments. Georgi Svilenski reminded that such punishments do not exist even in case of murder. According to him, the problem at the moment is not that there are no fines or other sanctions, but that the violators are not caught by the control authorities. He advised the authorities to check with the Ministry of Transport how many such cases of unregulated public transport have been caught and thus will be convinced that there are none.
In addition, according to the Socialists, in this way GERB is trying to ban the shared trip.
However, Stanislav Ivanov has a different opinion. He announced that GERB did not want to ban the shared trip because it was not a public transport and there were no benefits against the transportation of passengers.
