Entrepreneur’s saga in Belarus

Minsk City Hall works on calendar’s red days to re-register as many as possible the sole entrepreneurs into unitary private enterprises before the November 10 deadline.

148 unitary private enterprises were registered in Minsk over the past two days. The Minsk City Hall now mentions the figure of 500 people out of 75,000 entrepreneurs who decided to change their status, with just three days remaining before the November 10 deadline.

Dzmitry Antanevich, the head of registration and licenses department at the Minsk City Hall’s economic committee, told the European Radio for Belarus that his office worked on November 7 (day-off) and planned to remain opened this coming Saturday.

“There is no frenzy. We are not observing any huge lines. We work in a normal mode, but have decided to work over the weekend in order to help entrepreneurs. It is noteworthy that more people have come up in the past several days. As of today, 500 entrepreneurs have re-registered as unitary enterprises”, he said.

With 1089 more applications filed in the Minsk City Hall, one can estimate that around 2000 entrepreneurs will have been re-registered by November 10. The rest are waiting out until the New Year.

Uladzimir Nikolski, a sole entrepreneur, took six months to decide whether he should register as a unitary enterprise before filing his application yesterday. He runs five trade outlets but does not have enough relatives to employ them as vendors or register his business in their name.

“I made numerous calculations which showed that I would go almost bankrupt if I registered as a unitary enterprise. I waited until the very last moment, thinking the things would somehow change. But yesterday I pulled myself together and filed my application. When (officials at Minsk City Hall) learned that I wanted to re-register, they got really excited and almost made a fuss of me. The official procedure did not take a lot of time, but it did take a lot of nerves”, Nikolski said.

Effective from December 5, Nikolski will be called a unitary enterprise, but he had to make a written statement with officials that he would not change his mind.

His colleague, Hanna Krauchanka, will not re-register. First, she thought that she would register her outlets in the names of employees. But after she heard that a hired vendor defrauded the owner, Hanna decided to wait out.

“Perhaps, some people are taking risks and registering their business in the name of employees. But who can guarantee that there will be no deception. Even the best employee cannot be trusted. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I don’t see another way out for me yet”, Hanna said.