3 people protest in front of anti-corruption squad accusing it of protecting Codru town mayor

Three inhabitants of Codru town from the Chisinau municipality, protested on Monday, February 9, in front of the quarters of the Economic Crimes and Corruption Combating Center (ECCCC), accusing the institution of protecting mayor of the locality Vitalie Mazur, charging him with corruption, Info-Prim Neo reports. Those three persons protested for half a day in front of the ECCCC, posting a placard reading in Russian: “It’s enough to protect the Codru mayor!!! Observe the law!!!” “The mayor steals our town, but the ECCCC, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the General Prosecutor’s Office protect him. Our multiple complaints to these institutions resulted in nothing,” Serghei Diacov, the organizer of the protest, told journalists. According to him, the mayor committed over 10 offenses liable to penal punishments, but no penal proceeding has been started. Diacov accuses the mayor of having rented plots of land without holding tenders, and that is the reason why the protester has lodged between 40 and 50 complaints to the ECCCC, since April 2008. “A case is when the mayor gave 3 ares of land, free of charge, in the service of a vulcanization shop, docking the town budget of incomes. Being notified by me, the ECCCC decided not to start probing the case,” Diacov said The protester added that the mayor is supported by a group of town councilors, who approved, at the first sitting of this year, the allocation of 240 thousand lei for buying the mayor’s car, the sum amounting to 10% of Codru's budget. Rita Babina, another protester, said that, in the first month when he began to hold the office of a mayor, Vitalie Mazur bought an arm-chair valuing 5 thousand lei. “A person who loves people and wants to bring light, kindness and revival to Codru town, will never have dared such an immoral gesture and he would have worked for his inhabitants sitting even on a wooden chair,” Babina maintains. Asked by Info-Prim Neo, the ECCCC press service refused to comment the charges, specifying that it is the right of each citizen to state his opinion. The Codru mayor was not found to comment the accusations brought against him. In May 2008, Serghei Diacov staged a protest on the same topic in front of the Chisinau City Hall. He threatened that he would fire himself right in front of the City Hall, if mayor Dorin Chirtoaca didn’t intervene to solve the problem with Codru mayor Vitalie Mazur. That time Diacov brought two children of his, one of a very early age. The police managed to make the protesters surrender the bottles with fuel.