The Ministry of Internal Affairs conducts a landmark purchase – Newspaper Kommersant No. 144 (7345) dated 08/10/2022

The Ministry of Internal Affairs is buying a large batch of car and motorcycle numbers for almost 2 billion rubles – the corresponding tenders have been announced on the public procurement portal. There are no problems with the production of state registration plates yet, the manufacturers assured Kommersant: blanks are made of Russian aluminum, and now Chinese is used instead of American reflective film. However, in the future, there may be problems with imported spare parts for equipment for the production of number plates, experts warn.

A series of tenders for the purchase of a large batch of state registration plates (GRZ) is being held by the Special Purpose Center for Road Safety (TSSN BDD) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The total amount of the purchase, calculated by Kommersant based on data from the public procurement portal, is 1.9 billion rubles. In total, the police plan to purchase 6.8 million numbers of different types: ordinary white numbers for cars (with a two- and three-digit region code), motorcycles, trailers; yellow for taxis and buses; red for diplomats and blue for police cars. All products must comply with the requirements of GOST 2018. The results of the tenders will be summed up at the end of August, contracts will be concluded for a period until the end of 2023.

The TsSN of the Ministry of Internal Affairs regularly purchases state registration marks: at the beginning of the year, the center signed contracts with suppliers for 1.75 billion rubles, in 2021 – for almost 1 billion rubles, follows from the data of the public procurement portal. Selected companies produce plates with specific combinations of letters and numbers, after which they send ready-made sets to the regions, where they are distributed to the registration offices of the traffic police.

There are no problems with production yet, Ali Ibragimov, chairman of the Union of Car Number Manufacturers, assured Kommersant. “The blanks are made from Russian aluminium. The main question was about reflective film – until recently, its main supplier was the American company 3M (it left the Russian Federation in connection with the military operation in Ukraine.— “b”), he explained. “After her departure, Chinese and Korean counterparts were found, which were not inferior in quality, and even cheaper in price. So that problem has been solved.”

Chinese film was already used on license plates several years ago, but it “peeled off” faster than American, recalls Petr Shlyakhin, deputy chairman of the classic car committee of the Russian Automobile Federation, license plate collector. “But I think that manufacturers have drawn conclusions from that situation and are now using film from other suppliers,” he suggests. “By the way, few people know that the manufacturer of license plates gives a guarantee, and if the license plate peels off, you can replace it for free.”

Equipment for the industrial production of GRZ, Ali Ibragimov explained to Kommersant, is also Russian-made, but sensors, electronics, gear motors and a number of other components for them are mainly imported. “This problem is not acute yet, but the production of Russian analogues should already be dealt with,” the expert notes.

The documentation for the announced tenders contains a list of consignees of the purchased plates – 84 regional police departments (or the Ministry of Internal Affairs), as well as the CSN BDD itself. Deliveries of license plates for the newly opened traffic police departments in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, where it is already possible to register a car, are not mentioned in the tenders. It is known that in Kherson citizens with Russian passports receive license plates with the code 184, and citizens of Ukraine with Ukrainian passports receive temporary license plates with the coat of arms of the Kherson region and the letters KHE instead of the region code. Registration of cars takes place according to a temporary scheme – without technical inspection, OSAGO and payment of state duty, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs said. The numbers with which code are issued in Melitopol, where the registration department of the traffic police has also opened, is still unknown.

Ivan Tyazhlov