Transport minister Loke Siew Fook said that vehicles without a valid VEP would be issued a RM300 compound fine, which must be paid before they are allowed to leave Malaysia.

“We’re enforcing this from July 1 because ample time has already been given. As we’ve said before, we started with a soft advocacy approach on Oct 1, 2024,” he told a press conference at his ministry today.

The VEP scheme was first proposed eight years ago in 2017. It was postponed twice – once in 2019 and again in 2020 – before being revived last year.

A similar VEP system is being planned for foreign-registered vehicles entering from southern Thailand.

Loke said that those who have pre-registered but yet to complete the VEP process will also be fined and required to settle the fine before leaving the country.

“There’s another category – company-owned private vehicles. If these do not have a valid VEP and no registration was ever made, the driver of the company vehicle will be fined.

“However, if the vehicle has been pre-registered, we will issue a reminder notice instead of a fine. For this category, we are offering a bit more leeway because the process involves submitting various company documents,” he said.

Loke added that enforcement operations would be carried out outside the border checkpoints to prevent congestion.

Fines must be paid via cashless methods at road transport department (JPJ) counters, JPJ Mobile units, or online through MyEG.

During the soft enforcement phase, authorities randomly checked 52,012 Singapore-registered vehicles and issued 2,245 reminder notices (4.32%) to those without VEPs.

As of June 2, a total of 231,018 RFID tags had been issued for individual private vehicles, and 2,660 for company-owned private vehicles.