Deputy Mayor points out violations in allocating apartments for Transnistrian refugees

Chisinau Deputy Mayor Igor Lupulciuc voiced intention to relinquish his membership in the Municipal Commission for the Distribution of Permits to Transnistrian Refugees. At a City Hall meeting on Monday, Lupulciuc stated that he doesn’t agree with the way the authorities started to distribute apartments, after at the end of last week the municipality and the refugees reached the agreement that the remaining 50 applications would be examined until Tuesday, February 5. According to Igor Lupulciuc, this situation contravenes the conditions set by the mayor, according to which the apartments should be distributed in compliance with the social equity rule – “everybody should receive what he deserves”, the deputy mayor said. According to the quoted source, another approach has been adopted now, so that he doesn’t understand why they made all these efforts so far. Lupulciuc mentioned that it is the Housing Division which is responsible for delaying the issuance of permits. He said that the respective authority intended to transform the distribution of apartments into some sort of festivity. According to the deputy mayor, the division’s management didn’t listen to him when he insisted on stepping up the issuance of permits. Igor Lupulciuc requested that the head of the division, Dionisie Boaghie, be sanctioned for not executing the decisions of the Municipal Council as well as for insubordination and the refusal to present explanatory notes. General Mayor of Chisinau Municipality Dorin Chirtoaca mentioned that, even though an agreement was reached on the distribution of permits until Tuesday, later the Municipal Council decided that this event should take place on Thursday, February 7, so that the issuance of permits in apartments on Ginta Latina Street would be solved at same time with the evacuation of the studios by the refugees, so that the latter are not occupied abusively. The problem of the overdue utility bills, which in the case of some families reach 16 to 20 thousand lei, is also to be solved. In turn, Dionisie Boaghie asserted that he didn’t delay the issuance of permits, but on the contrary – he insisted that the documents are handed to the beneficiaries as soon as possible. According to the head of the Housing Division the problem was in the fact that, in order to take their permits, refugees had to submit a request, in which they would renounce the one-room flats they had in possession and provide evidence confirming that they paid all their utility bills. The applicants could not produce such evidence because of the huge debts for utility bills. About 100 internally displaced people from the eastern districts of Moldova blocked the meeting of the CMC on January 31, accusing the capital city’s administration of delaying the distribution of apartments in the building intended for them. The altercations lasted for several hours and the Council could not start its meeting. The protesters remained in the City Hall until the mayor general pledged to help them. At the meeting on February 5, the Chisinau Municipal Council (CMC) will consider allocating flats to 80 families that already occupied apartments in the building located on Ginta Latina Street.