After the decision to declare a state of emergency as from March 17 was adopted, Parliament was sent on a kind of voluntary leave as the sittings can be called only by the legislative majority that politically supports the current Government and the commissions it formed, said the chairman of the legislative body’s public finance control commission Igor Munteanu. According to him, from this viewpoint, Parliament currently does not ensure parliamentary control, which is actually a constitutional obligation of the supreme legislative authority.
“This is regrettable as, namely in crisis situations, the executive and the authorities created for particular purposes must be checked so as to prevent abuses and to optimize the budgetary resources,” Igor Munteanu stated in an interview for RFE/RL’s Moldovan Service that is quoted by IPN.
The MP of the PPPDA said that when the Prime Minister asked Parliament to declare a state of emergency, he should have come with a plan of action. “This plan should have mandatorily contained a budget as all these measures are costly not only in terms of money, but also as regards possible interference in the basic human rights, because, when you say that the army will become involved as of March 25 and the elderly people are obliged to stay at home, this implies important restrictions of the human rights and freedoms,” stated Igor Munteanu.
According to him, one cannot undertake to use money from the consolidated budget, the public budget, without Parliament knowing about this. “Therefore, we issued a press release, a statement by which we demand to restore parliamentary control over these sensitive areas and to resume the sittings of Parliament so that we could supervise more attentively the developments in the healthcare sector and see what the basic needs for treating patients are,” noted the MP.
He also said that everyone should indeed cooperate so as to identify optimal solutions. The economy suffers given the loss of 40-50% of all the remittances that came annually to the national economy and will now not come. The exchange rate of the leu will also be affected probably. The population’s tight savings will be under great strain.
“In such conditions, we must demand that the Government should take its duties seriously and that the public and private institutions should act in accordance with the instituted state of emergency. The Government of the Republic of Moldova should swiftly learn the lesson that other economies in Europe learned or are close to learning so that it thinks what we should do in half a year, how we can contain the pandemic now and can reintegrate the labor force into enterprises that should work in half a year,” stated Igor Munteanu.
