Chisinau budget passes first reading as opposition councilors denounce breach of voting procedure

The Chisinau City Council on Thursday, January 22, adopted at the first stage of scrutiny the city's budget for 2009, providing for incomes of 1.79bn lei and an equal amount of expenses, Info-Prim Neo reports. The budget adopted at this stage is by 314 million lei larger than the one proposed by Chisinau Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca initially. The initiative to equally raise expenses and planned revenues was launched by Communist councilor Tatiana Kunetski. “We've listened with great attention the mayor's report and found that the last year's budget targets were overachieved by 30 percent. This finding is in agreement with the position of our faction (PCRM) and therefore we are proposing this raise”, explained Kunetki. According to her, additional revenues will come from income taxes (295m lei), advertising (8m lei), farming taxes (8.4m lei), water tax (8m lei ) and market tax (1.6m lei). With only 22 votes in favor, Chirtoaca's budget proposal lost to the one promoted by the Communist faction, which gained 27 votes, with the help of the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, and independent councilors. But the AMN, the Liberal Democrat and the Liberal councilors insist the voting procedure was breached, claiming the budget was passed during the break. After the break, the opposition factions were denied a repeat voting and they left the assembly hall in protest.