Chisinau, November 22 (Infotag). The Moldovan Small Businesses Association says that 2005 has been perhaps the unhappiest year for small enterprise in this republic in terms of production development, crediting policy, or economic regulation at the central and local levels.

Association Chairman Eugen Roscovan told a news conference in Infotag today this year will remain in people’s memories for a whole number of governmental Resolutions, amendments to legislation and other official decisions “that will be simply ruinous for small businesses, but especially for micro-enterprises”.

“Starting from January 2006, for instance, taxes to be paid to local budgets for the opening of commercial objects will soar, he said. Simultaneously, the rate of taxes to be paid to the Social Fund by commercial patent holders and individual enterprises will be pushed up 3-fold against the year 2003”.

He further held that the present-day social policy “has a definitely discriminative character. Things have gone so far that the authorities deprive of work places even those entrepreneurs who have created the places for their own money. Another discrimination measure has been the prohibition to include the years, which a person has worked under his or her individual patent, into the service length account, and this tells greatly on the person’s pension size”.

The authorities force street vendors into ‘civilized markets’ and, at the same time, they close down these very markets. At the present time, intimidation and blackmail are used to force petty retailers from the Dynamo and Toamna de Aur markets in Chisinau. Similar measures are being used to treat patent holders in Balti city, said Eugen Roscovan.

The Association said that a particularly aggressive pressure is put on small entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises by the Chisinau Municipality.

“On the pretext of establishing order and building ‘a City of the Future’, the Municipality has practically liquidated the street trade as such. Chisinau has become a desert, a dead city”, as the Association Chairman put it.

Roscovan proposed to cancel the recent amendments to the Law on the Entrepreneurship Patent; to permit patent holders to hire up to 5 workers, and to permit issuing of patents to families; to introduce the institution of a “social market” and to convert the Dynamo Market in Chisinau into an exemplary facility of such kind – through implementing a pilot project there.