Polish number plates in Naples: the insurance that is saved is paid for by drivers in Poland

6 October 2026, 18:30

According to the Financial Times, around 60,000 people in Italy, almost all of them in Naples and its province, drive cars and motorbikes with Polish number plates. Ownership passes to a company registered in Poland that does no business at all, the car is registered there and goes back to its former owner under a rental contract. Car tax and insurance cost far less, and the fines go to the company. It is a scam.

Often there is no policy at all. When one of these cars causes an accident, the victim is compensated by PBUK, the bureau that brings together the companies insuring cars in Poland and lives on their contributions. From January to August this year it paid out 35 million zloty for Italy, which comes to about eight in euros. In the whole of 2025 it had been 18. The insurers pass that bill on to their own customers' policies.

So the Neapolitan driver's saving is not a saving: it is a bill moved elsewhere. It is the illegal hook-up to the neighbour's meter, where one person uses the electricity and another pays for it. Except that this neighbour lives in Poland, and cannot even come round to knock on the door.

The bigger problem is that the trick slips between two states that each look only at their own paperwork. Most of these cars, PBUK says, have never been driven in Poland. Now the Polish infrastructure ministry wants a photograph taken at the garage, at the roadworthiness test, proving that the car was there. Until now, evidently, no proof was needed.

In Italy, Article 93-bis of the Highway Code bars anyone living in the country from regularly driving a car registered abroad, with one exception: renting or leasing from a company based in another EU country, with the car entered in the register of foreign vehicles. It is a door designed for genuine fleets, and through it has walked the company that exists to receive the fines. Which, indeed, it never receives.

Now the door is narrowing. Since May, entry in that register also carries the provincial registration tax, and the new Highway Code, still being drafted, requires an Italian policy. Both rules also hit the business that genuinely rents a car from a European company: the bill for the trick reaches even those who never played it.

Until this summer, a traffic officer who stopped a Polish-plated car could wait days to learn from Warsaw whether it was insured. On 13 August a circular from the Interior Ministry opened a real-time link to the Polish databases. So the question, for the Interior Ministry: did it take 60,000 number plates to switch on a link?

In Naples they call it a saving. In Poland it arrives as a premium.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Financial Times on 4 October 2026.