Official: The Import Licenses Of vehicles Ready In A Week

Trade Minister, Bakhti Belaïb, has revealed that the import licenses of vehicles will be officially ready in a week’s time.

Indeed, this is what was stated by the Trade Minister on the sidelines of the signing of an agreement between the National Centre for Trade and the General Directorate of Algerian customs services.

And hence, these import licensing vehicles laying down quantitative quotas for each car-dealer, as the granted period has long expired, will be awarded in a few days’ time.

These car dealers which have been awaiting these quotas since February, hope now that the granted date won’t be postponed because the prescribed period shall be two months from the closing date of the transaction as the submission of the files (February 3, 2016) expired on 3 April with more than 80 applications being filed during this folders deposit operation so as to qualify for quantitative quotas on imports of vehicles set by the government at 152 000 units for the year 2016.

But the minister sought to reassure them by expressing the hope that the commission which is in charge of this operation will duly abide by this period of one week and that the relevant import licenses will be ready by then.

As a reminder, according to the Ministry of Trade, the delay is due to the fact that the Committee entrusted with issuing import licenses (comprising representatives of the Ministries of Trade, Industry, Finance, Agriculture, banking and customs) had started its work with the allocation of quotas of agricultural tariff products from the EU, in addition to cement and reinforcing bars, a task which required a lot of time.

In addition, during a meeting with exporters, Trade Minister, Bakhti Belaïb, warned that the distribution of quotas within the framework of the granting of import licenses for vehicles, won’t take into account speculative imports or the illicit transfer of currency overseas, practiced by some ill-advised car-dealers.

According to a source from the National Automobile Dealers Association, several of them have suffered scathing financial losses during the last Automobile Show-room of Algiers because of these delays for lack of stocks as they were unable to fulfill the growing customers’ demand.