Vasile Ursu, interim mayor of Chisinau, makes contradictory declarations regarding corruption in municipal services

General interim mayor of Chisinau Vasile Ursu declared during a meeting in the Mayoralty that since the Centre for Information and Documentation for citizens was opened the image of corrupt public servants carried by the workers of Architecture, Land and Urban Regime Control disappeared. According to him, all the documents are handed in at the offices of the respective Center, in this way avoiding any contact of the citizen with the public servants of the service. The interim mayor declared that the impression of corrupt public servants was caused by the existence of many intermediary persons, who „crowded the halls of the Mayoralty”, and who offered to solve quickly the problems of the citizens for a certain sum of money. Vasile Ursu declared that since the Centre for Information and Documentation was opened this persons were removed from the scheme. „It is true that intermediaries insist on entering the building of the Architecture Department but it is opened only for workers and only during working hours” mentioned the mayor. In the future all the documents that have to be analyzed and signed by the mayor, will have to have the signature of one of the mayor’s councilors. On the other hand, Vasile Ursu declared during the same meeting that in the previous days he refused to sign several decision projects proposed by the Architecture and Land departments regarding the privatization of several land plots situated near houses. The respective plots had exaggerated surfaces, including 18 and 24 acres. The interim mayor declared that he doesn’t exclude the existence of shadow agreements in this case. Vasile Ursu encouraged public servants not to give away land plots so easily, mentioning that an acre of land requested for privatization costs between USD 10 and USD 20 thousand.