(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Drivers with clean records will again benefit from a 15 per cent reduction in compulsory insurance payments in accordance with the law, after the discount was suspended for one year.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Jordan Insurance Federation (JIF), an umbrella of 27 insurance companies, said it had instructed all members to grant the offer to drivers who have avoided traffic violations throughout the year prior to renewing their insurance policies, starting from June 2011.
"It is our own initiative," JIF Director General Maher Hussein said in a telephone interview.
The incentive initially went into effect in January 2010 upon a recommendation endorsed by the Cabinet. However, insurance companies refrained from offering the reduction after a general pardon was issued in June 2011, citing an inability to decide who actually had a clean record and who had been pardoned under the amnesty.
Insurance representatives said traffic violations had been wiped from computer systems, so all drivers apparently had clean records.
Hussain confirmed that the stoppage was a result of this situation, adding that the JIF urged the government more than once to make this information available so as to resume offering the discount, but the relevant authorities failed to do so.
Now that the point is moot after the lapse of one year, "we are resuming the discount", he told The Jordan Times.
In reply to a question about the suspension, a JIF official on Tuesday blamed the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) for wiping the records completely without saving backup files or having in place a data recovery system.
A source from GAM, who declined to be named, said the archives of drivers' records were usually kept at the Traffic Department, charging that the JIF had used this issue as a pretext to "compensate for its losses".
"It does not matter who is responsible for keeping these records; they should have been kept available and there is a macro-management problem of the whole sector," Ali Wazani, CEO of First Insurance Company, said on Tuesday.
"We needed a whole year to reintroduce the discount" because of officials' failure to make the necessary data available, he said.
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