The losses sustained by the local budget of Chisinau during the last five years came to at least 300 million lei. The main losses are suffered as a result of privatization by tenancy as the relevant acts are often illegal and groundless, said experts of the Independent Analytical Centre “Expert-Grup”. In the study “Budgetary transparency in Chisinau municipality”, the experts highlight shortcomings in three areas: use of public property tenancy and lease, privatization and public procurement, IPN reports.
According to a communiqué of Expert-Grup, the privatization of land and non-residential areas is based on the lease/tenancy contract, but this should not be possible. Most of the privatization decisions are taken by the simple majority of votes of the Privatization Council, whose activity cannot be assessed by the public, especially because no reports are published. The normative prices for privatziaing non-residential areas in Chisinau municipality are by up to 10 times lower than the market ones owing to the absence of auction/contest procedures.
The land in Chisinau is privatized by two ways – by auction and by lease contract. None of them turned out to be transparent enough as they generate significant losses. The economic entities that rent the land lease it out to other companies at prices that are up to 8 times higher than the rent they pay. Some of the economic entities do not indicate this rent in order to hide the real incomes.
The Audit Office determined that about 20% of the analyzed acquisition contracts had additional contracts stipulating the higher sums. In 2011-2013, there were occupied illegally 50 ha of municipal land. The losses in this case represent about 75 million lei.
A major conclusion of the study is that the current level of budgetary transparency is insufficient, incomparable to the international practice, while the public procurement process is a closed one and witnesses serious violations of the existing normative framework.
