Kampala — UGANDA's inland car depot in Mombasa has finally been granted a licence to operate after two and a half years since its completion. The car depot, which can handle 3,000 vehicles daily, sits on five acres.

"The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has granted us a licence to operate a car depot in Mombasa," the managing director of Uganda Property Holdings, Albert Abaliwano, told MPs.

He said CPC Freight Services, the managers of the $3.57m (sh7.7b) project, had started gazzeting the project and business would start soon.

Abaliwano told MPs on the commissions, statutory and state enterprises committee that the licence was issued last week.

He said once business starts, the depot would reduce the high storage charges and continued vandalism of vehicles destined for Uganda.

Though the depot was constructed to help Ugandans clear imported vehicles, importers from Southern Sudan, Rwanda, DR Congo and Burundi will use it.

"The Kenyan civil servants are in the same business. When they saw that Uganda had put up a state-of-the-art depot, they thought they were going to lose business and influenced the delay of the licence," Abaliwano explained.

Interventions by the ministries in charge of East African affairs, foreign affairs and finance were fruitless. The Kenyan finance minister also gave a directive to KRA to issue the licence, but it did not.

Recently, Kenya ordered some Ugandan vehicles to be donated to Southern Sudan because they had stayed in Mombasa for long.