Driving licenses gotten by bribes to be withdrawn

Photo: ERIK PROZES/

Road Administration director-general Priit Sauk promises that recordings of practical driving tests by those that police says gave bribes will be separately reviewed. 

- To Postimees’ knowledge, the scheming with bribes basically happens between driving schools and examiners. A student will notify a school of his problem, and the sums move through there.

The likelihood does exist, yes. I have not been told about the scheme.

- But you do have something like internal control?

Even so, people are crafty. Naturally, we are continually updating our systems. Currently, all practical test drives are recorded in the vehicles, in video and audio.

- But what’s the problem, then – aren’t these examined sufficiently?

They are, indeed. Naturally, these could be all watched, as that would be a tremendous amount of time. The task of the managers is primarily to watch random videos, and on top of that we have called into being an internal control to do it additionally.

If something unbefitting is discovered, it is naturally up to internal control to react. To my knowledge, none has detected passing of money on our recordings. But all that is insufficient and we must think of some other means.

- In retrospect, will you also check these individuals who did their tests under these examiners?

We have not gone down that path to begin to control the work of all these five examiners a hundred percent. First and foremost, the information comes from police and prosecutor’s office. These exams need to definitely be reviewed and the people who have indeed participated in the scheme will probably be deprived from the right to drive. But this cannot be done before investigative bodies give us the names of these individuals.

- You don’t know, at the moment, how many there may be?

Regrettably I cannot tell if it is one, ten or fifty. Today (yesterday – edit) morning, for instance, I received information that the amount of one examiner this year is about 800. That’s pretty impressive. I assume that the percentage of abuse is smaller [rather than larger]. I don’t want to believe it is so massive that we have to recall half of these. I hope that is not the case.