Eighty percent of driver’s license are bought, NGO head claims

YEREVAN, September 6. /ARKA/. Some 80% of motorists in Armenia cheat their way to a driver’s license by paying bribes ranging from 90,000 to 150,000 drams, Tigran Hovhannisyan, the head of the League for the Protection of Drivers, said to journalists on Wednesday. "As a matter of fact, there is a national auction for the sale of driver's licenses, and the amount of bribes paid for obtaining license depends on the region," he said.

Hovhannisyan blamed the practice on citizens who contribute this way to the expansion of this vicious system, since they prefer to pay, not to study driving and traffic rules at special schools. "The problem is also in the driver training system, where everything is simplified. Driving schools do not provide the minimum required level of skills for safe driving," he said.

According to him, this leads to a drop in the overall level of driving skills and the increase in the number of road accidents.

"According to a latest rating Armenia ranks third in the world in terms of the number of deaths in road accidents per one million people, and today I would not be surprised if we rank first. Police usually hush up the real number of traffic accidents and the death toll in them,’ he claimed. ($ 1 - 478.29 drams). -0-