Mreo is brought out of the shadows

The Main Department of Internal Affairs of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region decided to put an end to the confusion in the commercial MREO market. In the near future, a whole bunch of small, separate units will be closed as they do not meet the new standards. Ordinary St. Petersburg residents may not notice this, but for criminal elements, life will clearly become more complicated.

How many commercial interdistrict registration and examination departments (MREO), working in parallel with state ones, does St. Petersburg need? Ten? Twenty? Now there are about forty of them in the city. And this despite the fact that several large centers, each of which can serve three hundred people daily, would fully meet the needs of the metropolis. For a long time, law enforcement agencies turned a blind eye to the fact that in St. Petersburg there are clearly more separate MREO units than the city may need. Finally, the time has come to deal with this market.
Recently, the qualification requirements that the Central Internal Affairs Directorate now imposes on separate units were published. At first glance, there is nothing special in these requirements - the MREO must be located in a non-residential permanent building, have its own area for inspecting cars and parking, and provide a minimum set of amenities for workers and visitors. Everything seems to be logical. But if you take a closer look at the MREOs currently working, it becomes clear that even half of them do not meet these requirements.
To once again make sure of this, the Central Internal Affairs Commission made a tour of all separate units on August 21. Department employees inspected the premises, parking lots and parking lots (where they were), and studied the locations of the MREO. It turned out that some units were comfortably located on the first floors of residential buildings, delighting residents with an endless stream of cars under their windows, others did not bother organizing parking lots, offering clients to park wherever they could, and others did not even have chairs for visitors.
The commission also got to small MREOs, the existence of which few people know. They are usually located in inconvenient locations, somewhere in industrial areas, on the outskirts of car markets or in the suburbs. It’s as if they don’t have any clients - the room is always empty, there are no queues. At the same time, such MREOs have existed for many years and seem to have no intention of closing. Where does the income come from if there are few clients?
As a source close to the Central Internal Affairs Directorate told Novaya, the department suspects such MREOs of dubious transactions with cars. For example, by special arrangement, you can register a car with unreadable engine and body numbers here. Sometimes this is just harmless help for a person who is renting or registering an old car with rusted license plates. But what if we are talking about deliberately etching numbers to make them unreadable? In the state MREO, such a car will immediately be sent for examination (what if it is stolen?), but in a small private one, where one inspector works, they can turn a blind eye to this. Obviously, closing your eyes is not free.
In addition, even if the number is not erased, in some cases it is impossible to read it without lifting the car onto an overpass. And in small MREOs there are simply no overpasses. However, despite the physical inability to properly examine the license plate, cars are still registered there.
Now such MREOs have practically no chance. They literally do not comply with the new standards on all counts. Thus, the Central Internal Affairs Directorate solves two problems at once in one fell swoop. Firstly, it introduces uniform rules of the game for everyone, which should have a positive impact on the quality of service for motorists, and secondly, it cuts off oxygen for criminal elements, who will now find it much more difficult to legalize cars with a dubious history.

Alexander SOROKIN