Justice Ministry freezes Chisinau City Hall's accounts, week before City Day

A week before the City Day, the Justice Ministry has sequestered seven bank accounts of the Chisinau City Hall. Civil servants from the City Hall claim the sequestration is illegal, since it envisages certain decisions of the Municipal Council (CMC) not of the City Hall, Info-Prim Neo reports. The sequestration has been explained by not carrying out several writs, through which courts obliged the CMC to give apartments to a number of people, and to execute a decision issued by the ECHR. As a result, the City Hall functionaries say the municipality cannot make any money transfer; the organization of the City Day has been left without financing, and a part of the City Hall's employees cannot lift their salaries. The City Hall's lawyer, Diana Gurschi, told the Hall's sitting Monday that “the City Hall has no connection with the writs, since they oblige the CMC to give apartments to police, judges and prosecutors.” No court has issued any writ concerning the City Hall, Gurschi said. According to her, the Justice Ministry's decision is illegal also because the law guarantees the payment of the salary to any employee. Concerning the ECHR case, mayor Dorin Chirtoaca has said “it's a special and very interesting case”. “As a result the ones having deported people to Siberia, having deprived them from houses, the Communists, obliged by the European Court of Human Rights to pay damages, are very smart to freeze the City Hall's accounts,” he said. The City Hall is to register the sequestering decision within 10 days and then it can sue it. Earlier the judiciary sequestered the City Hall's cars. The case was then won by the Chisinau City Hall, which claimed the public goods cannot be sequestered.