Route Cab Drivers Go On Hunger-Strike in Brest

Private businessmen protest against the need to pay an additional fee of tens of millions of rubles per each car for using the car for commercial purposes, reported Radio Liberty.
The pretext for the hunger-strike was the actions by the taxation agency that makes some of the Brest busionessmen with a license to passenger transportation pay a Republican fee for using cars brought to the Republic of Belarus for commercial purposes.
This fee was established on the basis of decree No.140 issued by Aliaxandr Lukashenka in April, however the taxation agencies believe that this fee also concerns those businessmen that brought their cars from abroad much earlier. As a result, the owners of the cabs have to pay an additional fee of 25 to 50 million rubles.
So requirement were forwarded only to a part of the cab owners who did not manage to persuade neither the taxation authorities nor the economic court that the law cannot be retroactive. The colleagues of these businessmen think that soon this Republic fee will be applied to all other cab owners and not only in Brest. That's why the businesswoman Lubou Rezanovich refers to the hunger-strike as an enforced step: "Now we refuse from food, in two or three weeks if the authorities do not pay attention we will refuse from water. We will be dying from hunger because we do not have so much money".
According to Ms Rezanovich she and four of her colleagues have already started hunger-strike. About twenty local businessmen are prepared to join in.