In the Republic of Moldova, there are over 4,700 hazardous industrial objects, such as lifts, industrial machines, filling station equipment and others. The eight national insurance companies issued insurance policies for only 17% of them. Last year, insurance as a result of incidents involving hazardous industrial objects was asked by two applicants, with the insurance totaling about US$ 1,000, said Moldovan insurers that took part in a poll organized with support from the USAID-funded Moldova Financial Sector Transparency Activity, IPN reports.
Under the law, the insurance for eventual damage is set based on the assessment of risks typical of the insurance contract for hazardous industrial objects. The insurance companies use own risk assessment criteria as there is no norm in Moldova that would classify the hazardous industrial objects depending on the size of the damage they can cause, the Economic Council of the Prime Minister said in a press release. The legal norms also do not define the nature of damage that should be covered with insurance.
The Economic Council noted that Parliament adopted a law that specified the size of insurance for eventual damage to hazardous industrial objects. Depending on the category of danger of hazardous industrial objects, this varied from 5 to 100 million lei. Then the business community said the new provisions will ruin primarily the SMEs, which will be unable to pay huge damage as the setting of a fixed sum of the insurance by law increases 100 times the insurance premium. One year later, the lawmakers returned to the old norms with the intention of working out a normative framework that would propose a solution in the field.
The secretariat of the Economic Council and the Ministry of Economy and Infrastructure used the international expertise in this regard, connecting experts of the Moldova Financial Sector Transparency Activity to this process. As a result of discussions with all the parties of the process, the experts will formulate a set of proposals that will be debated within the Council.
