Running Red Lights & Car Impounding

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Well yesterday was an experience. For the first time in Dubai I had to go and re-register the car. One of my friends at work told me what he had had to do a few weeks ago so I thought that I was all ready and clued up for the process. Apparently the place opens at 7am and if you get there early you will get in and out quickly otherwise you could be there for hours.

So Dave and I were at Tasjeel at 7am. The first thing that you have to do is to have a vehicle inspection, however joy of joys because my car is new (only one year old) it didn't need to have an inspection. So all I would need to do would be to go to the counter and pay some money and get my new registration card.

Of course this is where it all went wrong. When we got to the counter they checked the computer records and discovered that the car had two fines on it. And that one of them was for running a red light. Dave and I both looked at each other (both mentally blaming the other person I would imagine) but then we looked at the date of the fine and discovered that it was for Wednesday September 12, 2007 at 12:34 so it must have been me (or potentially the ex)

Anyway there is a AED710 fine for running a red light and your car has to be impounded for a week. However Dubai being Dubai you can just pay some more money and your car doesn't have to be impounded. But we figured that we have two cars and that Dave was going to be away for the next week so it didn't really matter if the jeep was impounded so we said to keep it. The helpful guy behind the counter then sent us off on a bit of a wild goose chase that invloved driving around buildings, hunting for pieces of paper and not finding anywhere where we could get the car impounded and when we ended up back at the fines department in our hunt for the vehicles confiscation department we decided that we would just pay the extra AED 720 and keep the car as that was going to be the easiest thing to do.

So at the end of the day we still have the jeep, it is re-registered but I am currently AED1400 out of pocket.

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