Under its freshly approved National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Romania will buy 19 customs scanning machines for 36 million euros, which could be operational at the end of next year, head of the General Customs Directorate Marcel Simion Mutescu said on Thursday, as he attended the launching conference of the anti-smuggling campaign, organized by JTI Romania.
Mutescu explained that 65 million euros will be allocated through NRRP to the Customs Directorate, and that apart from the 36 million euros that will be spent on scanners, the rest of the money will be used for computer applications, hardware infrastructure, other control equipment and cars.
"At least in theory, the machines should be purchased by end-2023. These are not products available in stock. There are only 5 or 6 manufacturers of customs scanning machines in the world. As soon as the money is available, we will put the contract up for tender. From the moment the tender procedure is completed, we'll probably have them delivered and up and running in about 4 or 6 months at the most. As a time horizon, this will probably happen towards the end of next year," said Marcel Simion Mutescu, who added that Romania has 15 mobile scanning machines, which are all non-functional, and a fixed functional such machine in the port of Constanta, but that the latter is way past its normal service lifetime.