Minsk: Activists of Entrepreneurs’ Union Movement Intend to Hold Meeting on 12 March
The activists of the entrepreneurs’ movement Siarhei Balykin and Aliaksandr Makaieu have applied to Minsk City Executive Committee for permission to hold a meeting in Minsk on 12 March.
According to the information Mr. Balykin gave to BelaPAN the aim of the meeting is drawing public attention to problems of individual entrepreneurs and elaboration of proposals for development of legal regulation of business activity in the country. ‘The main reason for the meeting is decree #760, signed by the president at the end of 2006. According to it since 1 April 2007 individual entrepreneurs are prohibited to sell a group of goods and since 1 January 2008 – to employ workers except for their close relatives,’ Balykin said. ‘We think that the last prohibition will lead to disappearance of individual entrepreneurs in Belarus. A great number of individual entrepreneurs will have to re-register as juridical bodies, but not all of them will manage to do it.’
The meeting organizers ask the CEC to authorize the meeting in Iakub Kolas square, but don’t rule out that the authorities would transfer it to Banhalor Square, as they usually do.
We should remind that Siarhei Balykin is an initiator of the establishment of a new association of individual entrepreneurs with the aim to represent and defend their economic interests and coordinate their activity. According to him, the Civil Code lets individual entrepreneurs to establish such association following the principles which they haven’t yet used. Now there are only associations of representatives of middle and large big business in Belarus.
‘In order to reach this aim it is necessary to unite as many individual entrepreneurs as possible. Pitifully enough, none of the now existent entrepreneurs’ associations can defend interests of their members well enough, pointed Balykin. ‘The main problem lies in the absence of qualified economical and legal expertise of the decisions that are taken by the state as well as insufficient research of the proposals put by the entrepreneur community’.
