Chisinau Council sitting finally completed after three months of stalemate

The Chisinau city councilors today have finally reached the end of the agenda for the sitting which was opened on June 11 and which was postponed at least 10 times since, Info-Prim Neo reports. Today’s meeting was attended by 39 out of 51 members of the Council and was presided over by another councilor, Pavel Caba of the Moldova Noastra Alliance (AMN), who replaced absentee Christian-Democrat Alexandru Corduneanu. Several additional issues were introduced on the agenda, including the situation at the municipal Health Division, which has been confronting for several months with a duality authority – one director was appointed by mayoral ordinance and another one by the City Council. The Liberal leader in the Council, Ion Ciobanu, suggested striking off some of the items on the order of the day, saying that they had a purely political motivation at the time when they were introduced. After scolding the fellow councilors for the situation at the Health Division and for the failure to enforce a court order in favor of the director appointed by the Council, Valery Klimenko (Ravnopravie Movement) suggested the issue should be postponed until the next sitting. Ion Arteni, the Council’s nomination for director of the Health Division, spoke before the councilors of his straitened financial situation which he faces because he hadn’t received any salary for eight months since the struggle started for the helm of the Division. In reply, AMN councilor Oleg Cernei told Arteni he had no employment contract with the mayor in order to receive a salary and suggested him to go back to his previous job, even though his rival for the seat of the Health Division head, Mihai Moldovan, could prefer the seat of MP to which he was chosen over the one in the Division. The councilors failed to agree on the date of the next sitting.