According to the now published information, the police stopped the truck on Tuesday in Široké Brod, a local part of Mikulovice.
“The patrol believed that the car was overloaded and therefore asked the driver to check it using a portable low-speed weighing scale. But the 33-year-old foreigner refused, saying that he would rather pay the fine,” described police spokesman Libor Hejtman.
Subsequently, the man surprised the police by taking out the sum of one hundred thousand in cash from the wallet in his backpack. However, simply paying the fine was not enough for him to continue driving.
“In these cases, the driver is always prohibited from driving until the load is transferred to another car to ensure compliance with the regulations. Police officers can, for example, temporarily remove license plates, but usually the carrier immediately sends another truck to the location and part of the cargo is transferred,” said Hejtman.
According to him, since the introduction of the 100,000 fine the year before last, there have been situations in the Olomouc Region where the driver refused to weigh the car, only in a few cases.
The decision to pay a straight high fine indicates that the load must have exceeded the permitted norm very significantly. The police can impose a penalty of 9,000 kroner for every ton that exceeds the maximum permissible limit. In order for the driver to “save” by refusing to weigh, he would have to have a car overloaded by more than eleven tons.
Police officers from the Olomouc region recently received only the second low-speed scales, which they initially deployed in Jesenice. They have been using the first since 2017. The governorship, which donated them, is reacting to road damage caused by overloaded lorries and trucks.
