Belarus’s entrepreneurs try to dodge a new economic status
One of the most widespread schemes is to register your shops in the name of hired vendors and make them individual entrepreneurs. That’s exactly what Syarhey, an individual entrepreneur who sells digital appliances at the Kamarouski Market in Minsk, is going to do.
“Now I run two shops. I will leave one for myself and register the other one in the name of my vendor. Shortly, I plan to open another shop and will also have it registered for another person. I am forced to trust my vendor. Otherwise, I will simply go bankrupt,” he said.
Entrepreneur Yauhen Skuratovich has another option. He will not re-register as a private unitary enterprise. Instead, he has hired his sister who had to leave her job in order to save a family business. Yauhen says the scheme about registering his firm with another person is dangerous.
“Since I run only one shop, I have found the way out of this situation. If I had two or three trade outlets, I would then register my vendors as individual entrepreneurs. But I’m afraid that the government will open a hunt for this kind of individual entrepreneurs,” Skuratovich said.
Re-registering as a unitary enterprise is a straight road to poverty, he says. None of Yauhen’s collegues plans to join the ranks of unitary enterprises. Everybody has decided to wait out until the New Year. According to Yauhen, only one individual entrepreneur, operating trade outlets at the Parking Trade Center, obeyed the president’s decree.
“There are 250 entrepreneurs running their business in the Parking center. One woman has changed her status and is already tearing her hair, because her business immediately went into the red. She didn’t even realize that she would be affected that fast,” Skuratovich said.
Alexander Potupa, the chairman of the Belarusian Union of Entrepreneurs, believes that this scheme of dodging the unitary enterprise status cannot last for long. The government will definitely come up with another measure to see if individual entrepreneurs can survive.
Another tricky thing is that you must have a 100-percent trust in your vendor whom you need to register as an individual entrepreneur to run your operations. Vendors too have to think twice before agreeing to this offer. If things turn bad, their own property can easily be confiscated by the state.
There is yet another scheme that can help save your business with the least losses. However, it is rather complex.
Alexander Potupa: “For instance, someone is going to re-register as a unitary enterprise. Under the beneficial procedure, he/she must give away their individual entrepreneur license. At the same time, it is possible to bring along your vendor and register him/her as an individual entrepreneur, while you are becoming a unitary enterprise. In this case, one can play a quite interesting but complex combination. That is to keep the channels of commodity supplies through individual entrepreneurs, but also to do something through a unitary enterprise”.
Individual entrepreneurs are forced to use these schemes. That’s why only 160 unitary enterprises have been registered in Minsk, while there are only 6 of them in Homel. On the other hand, the number of individual entrepreneurs in Minsk has grown by 12000.
Potupa: “There were 12 new individual entrepreneurs registered this year. Both the union and the government think that this is a sign of opposition to the president’s decree No 760”.
The European Radio for Belarus called the department of entrepreneurship at Minsk City Hall, but nobody was able to name the exact figures.
Photo: photo.bymedia.net
