Mario Mendez, the economic editor of Hoy newspaper, is reporting today that the Dominican Port Authority has decided to apply standard charges for local cargoes handled at the multi-modal port of Punta Caucedo. This means that cargo coming into Caucedo will get the same treatment as cargo at any other Dominican port. Caucedo will cease giving free zone treatment to the freight entering its terminals, something that the Port Authority now says is against the law. The Port Authority spokesperson said that free zone privileges gave Caucedo an unfair advantage over the other container ports in the Dominican Republic, but that these advantages were not being passed on to the customers. The decision to begin collecting normal tariffs for local cargoes was approved at a meeting of the authority last 7 June. The representative for the shipping companies was asked to transmit the message to Caucedo that they had to normalize their accounts with the Dominican government and the Port Authority forthwith. This decision comes on the heels of various complaints that the Punta Caucedo operation was violating Law 8-90 that oversees free zones because it was not paying tariffs on local cargoes that were handled in the port. Even stranger was the fact that Caucedo was not passing along these savings to its clients and, at times, was charging as much as three times the tariffs charged in other Dominican container ports.