SUWAYDA, Syria (North Press) – Drivers in Suwayda, south Syria, say that people, who are allegedly employed to organize the queues and prevent disputes in front of fuel stations, ask the drivers to pay royalties in exchange for an amount of gasoline.
Drivers receive twenty liters of petrol, through special smart cards, at a price of 750 SYP per liter every four days.
No gasoline without paying royalties
Rasmi al-Rayan (pseudonym), car driver, said that those who organize the line in front of the fuel stations “regularly ask for royalties of about 5,000 SYP in order to get gasoline.”
The driver tried several times not to pay these royalties “therefore the employee refused, in coordination with other royalty-takers, to fill my car’s tank with fuel under the pretext that I did not adhere to the station’s queue.”
Al-Rayan pointed out that, like others, he is forced to pay these royalties “in order to be able to secure my family’s living.”
Drivers are forced to wait in the line for two days in order to have gasoline in light of decreasing Suwayda’s allocations.
On March 30, the Syrian government decreased the allocations of gasoline of Suwayda from 11 to 2 tanks per day.
Each tank of gasoline is estimated at 40,000 liters which does not cover more than 15% of Suwayda’s needs, according to an official in the council of Suwayda governorate.
Meanwhile, about 350 cars are waiting in front of the fuel station to get gasoline, which means collecting the amount of 1,750,000 SYP of royalties if each driver pay 5,000 SYP.
Accusations
A worker at a fuel station in Suwayda said that these royalties go to “the owner of the station, the collectors, the Government Monitoring Committees, and some officers of the security services.”
Ra’ed al-Wafed (pseudonym), a driver from Suwayda, said that “most of those assigned to collect royalties from the drivers are known for their ties with “security apparatus that provide security coverage for them as well as got benefits of those royalties.”
Last week, al-Wafed witnessed the presence of the Governmental Monitoring Committee at the office of the owner of the petrol station after a complaint was submitted by one of the drivers about imposing royalties, “the committee left without taking any action.”
“The bribes that some monitoring committees receive from the station owners increased the royalties without submitting any violations, where there is no government or deterrent laws in Suwayda,” al-Wafed added.
Asking for royalties becomes overt without fearing the government monitoring committees, according to drivers in Suwayda.
However, a government official, who is a member in a fuel committee of Suwayda, said that they have submitted five violations against five stations throughout the governorate since the beginning of March.
However, he refused to comment on the royalties that the drivers had complained about pretending that he had no information regarding this issue.
“Local community has to report about any cases of corruption that may occur inside gasoline stations,” he noted.