The local public authorities are not the enemies of the business community, but are its most reliable partners, said the executive director of the Congress of Local Authorities of Moldova (CALM) Viorel Furdui. He called on the business community not to yield to the provocations of persons who pursue narrow goals and said that the CALM is ready to sit at a roundtable meeting together with the business community so as to identify solutions to all the problems. According to him, the Government’s initiative to cap local taxes is an attempt to undermine the relationship between the LPAs and the business community. The CALM called on the Government and the Ministry of Finance to stop the actions that affect the relations between the local authorities and the business community, IPN reports.
Viorel Furdui noted that the capping of taxes is not supported by national agro-industrial associations either. He made reference to a message sent to the Congress by a number of agro-industrial entities, which says that they do not support the 2021 budgetary-fiscal policy.
The CALM insists that the capping of local taxes is not in the general interest of the business community, but is in the interests of obscure groups. The CALM invites the business community to analyze the highest caps and to see if these affect principally the SMEs.
Viorel Furdui said that a roundtable meeting involving experts in public finance and economy from Moldova and Romania was held recently and the main conclusion reached there was that the capping of local taxes in Moldova is premature and most of the participants said that it is not necessary. The whole system of local finances needs to be reviewed.
The CALM called on the Prime Minister and the minister of finance to analyze the situation, to organize discussions, to play the role of mediator at the discussions between the LPAs and the business community so as to find solutions, to stop the adoption of the decision about local taxes and to start to discuss the whole system of local taxes. It also called upon Parliament to become involved in discussions and to assess the impact of the measure to cap local taxes and asked the Ministry of Justice to pronounce on the constitutionality and compatibility of the capping of taxes against the Constitutional Court’s decision of 2014, by which the capping of local taxes was declared unconstitutional.
