News
Rita Trabulo, Startinnovation team's Managing Associate, and Francisco Grijó, trainee lawyer at CCA Law Firm, speaking to Observador, comment on the case of Tiago Silva Pereira, founder, and president of Wyze Mobility - the first Portuguese startup to offer a shareable electric scooter service - who lodged a complaint for the extra 10 thousand euros charged for the registration of its 260 electric scooters at the Institute of Registries and Notaries (IRN).
At issue here is a first isolated registration of a scoter which was charged a fee of €20 - the amount that vehicles with a cylinder capacity of less than 50 cm³ are required to pay - and a second registration of the remaining fleet, where the Institute presents an invoice of €55 per vehicle. The IRN claims that the interpretation of the law will have been different among the employees, but that the amount charged is correct. The founder of the startup filed a complaint and exposed the situation to the Ombudsman.
According to the Registries and Notaries Fees Regulation, for each registration of a moped “with a cylinder capacity not exceeding 50 cm³", the payment shall be €20. However, this article does not apply to vehicles with electric motors, even if they are in the category of mopeds or motorcycles, tricycles or quadricycles. There is, therefore, a legal void that gives rise to different points of view within the same entity. Rita Trabulo and Francisco Grijó explain that "this is a gap in the law that needs to be resolved, as different charges have been applied. The regulation should have been updated or read in such a way that the equivalent of a cylinder capacity of 50 cm³ is 4 KW in electric vehicles".
- Observador