It is out of sheer frus­tra­tion that I am now turn­ing to the me­dia to see if my writ­ing this let­ter will shake the nec­es­sary par­ties in­to ac­tion. One of our com­pa­ny ve­hi­cles was in­volved in an ac­ci­dent and the in­sur­ance com­pa­ny han­dling the claim wrote the ve­hi­cle off and of­fered us a set­tle­ment on it. How­ev­er, one of the claus­es for our com­pa­ny to claim the cheque was that we pro­duce the cer­tifi­cate of own­er­ship. We searched through our files and could not find any so I in­struct­ed an em­ploy­ee to go to the Li­cens­ing Of­fice to re­quest a copy.

De­spite sev­er­al at­tempts to do so, on each oc­ca­sion we have been told that the Li­cens­ing Of­fice could not find any record on our ve­hi­cle, PBW 5646, which I as­sure you was legal­ly bought and reg­is­tered by All Round Trad­ing Co some sev­en years ago. Need­less to say, in the mean­time the ve­hi­cle is in need of re­pairs and the in­sur­ance com­pa­ny will not re­lease the funds need­ed to make those re­pairs. I find this sit­u­a­tion quite lu­di­crous and I am de­mand­ing that Trans­port Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj now gets in­volved and gets this mess sort­ed ur­gent­ly at the Li­cens­ing Of­fice. Sev­er­al of my col­leagues have al­so com­plained that they have had sim­i­lar ex­pe­ri­ences with re­quests made at the Li­cens­ing Of­fice. Seems like this is com­mon­place.

I find this lev­el of in­com­pe­tence in this day and age of tech­nol­o­gy in­tol­er­a­ble and from what I have heard it is not for a want of spend­ing our pre­cious tax dol­lars in an at­tempt to get the files at the Li­cens­ing Of­fice com­put­erised and up-to-date. Ma­haraj, I re­quest your as­sis­tance in this mat­ter and ad­vise that we will make one fur­ther at­tempt to se­cure the cer­tifi­cate of own­er­ship the day af­ter this let­ter is pub­lished, as­sum­ing some­one in your min­istry with clout would have read it.

Al­li­son Ma­g­a­lhães

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor

All Round Trad­ing Co Ltd