BelToll fined Slovak €2,000 “by mistake”

The toll collecting system imposed toll charges on a non-existing vehicle.

Aliaksandr from the town of Krupki tells the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belarusi why it happened.

“My father-in-law is a Slovak. He came to Belarus in August. We bought the on-board unit as soon as we heard that the country would use BelToll system. My father-in-law spent six months in Belarus. He was stopped by the road police several times, but everything was okay. We topped up the account regularly,” Aliaksandr says. “We, the whole family, went to Ukraine on December 29. We returned the on-board unit on the border, because we planned a month's trip outside the country and thought the unit could get lost, broken or be stolen. They returned us 200,000 rubles from the account and 20 euros of the deposit.

We had to return to Belarus next day to solve some issues. We were stopped by the road police just after the border. They checked the registration number and fined us 2150 euros. They said we didn't pay for the road. We didn't pay the fine. Firstly, we didn't have that sum, secondly, we didn't understand why we should pay it. The car was taken to a vehicle pound near Brest. I have to pay 20 euros for every second day in the pound.

It turned out that the girl, who sold us the on-board unit and prepared the contract, made a mistake and wrote C instead of S in the registration number. I don't understand why the mistake was found six months later. The road police checked us many times!

Aliaksandr and his father-in-law sent a claim to the Austrian company and received a 30-page reply 15 days later.

“I studied all documents but didn't understand what our guilt was,” Aliaksandr says. “We paid the fine (2150 euros) and 500 euros for the pound. We are preparing documents to apply to a court now.”