Although the Supervisory Committee for Motor Vehicle Imports announced earlier this month that the last day to file for a vehicle import permit under the current importation policies was December 23, the Ministry of Commerce has now placed a complete ban on individual car imports.
According to the Myanmar Times, authorities have had to prohibit any more import applications for the rest of the year — the new policies will be in place on January 1, 2017 — due to a surge in fraudulent applications.
How big of a surge? The Times reports that approximately 90 percent of applications following the announcement of the new policies were fake.
It came to the ministry’s attention that people were applying for permits using fake NRC and household registration cards, cards belonging to someone else, and even cards belonging to deceased individuals.
In a lot of the fraudulent cases, car brokers were the ones arranging the applications by monetarily incentivizing citizens to use their ID’s for permit applications.
“They brought in people to apply for a permit that don’t know anything about cars let alone have enough money to import one. Some applicants even wore fake gold jewelry to pretend they were rich enough to buy a car,” Deputy Director Kyaw Soe Win of the Department of Trade told the Times.
Although obviously not everyone applying for a permit were doing so illegally, the number of fraudulent applications were so high that the ministry ultimately had no choice but to shut it down altogether.
Under the new import policies, all imported cars intended for personal use must have been manufactured between 2015 and 2017. All imported vehicles must also be left-hand drive. This means that the older right-hand Japanese models that are popular in Myanmar will soon be prohibited for importation, hence brokers’ eagerness to get as many of them in as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, current vehicle prices had already been jacked up once the new policies were made public, and this new ban will probably drive those price tags up even higher.
