One week after the arrest of deputy mayor of Chisinau Nistor Grozavu and another six persons in the case of pay parking lots, Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca said he didn’t know that the deputy mayor signed the public-private partnership contract with EME Parkleitsystem without the consent of the Chisinau Municipal Council (CMC). The authors of a new Sic! article tried to find out how plausible this assertion is and in what circumstances it is possible.
In October 2014, CMC adopted a decision on the approval of the study concerning the parking strategy for Chisinau municipality. In a year, by order of the mayor, it was decided to call a meeting of the CMC for December 10. In the agenda of the meeting, the mayor included the draft decision concerning the approval of the public-private partnership contract between the Chisinau City Hall and EME Parkleitsystem for the building of pay parking lots. December 3 is the date when this contract was signed. Nistor Grozavu signed it on behalf of the Chisinau City Hall. On December 10, Mayor Chirtoaca decided, without many explanations, to withdraw the given draft decision from the agenda of the CMC meeting and since then the contract hasn’t reached the Council.
At the start of 2016, activist Adrian Filat submitted a preliminary application to sue Dorin Chirtoaca to the City Hall, whereby he warns the mayor that the signing of the contract is illegal without the approval of the CMC. Afterward, the Socialist group on the CMC filed another preliminary application addressed to Dorin Chirtoaca by which this demands to annul the signed contract and the contest to choose a private operator. In April 2016, activists Victor Chironda and Adrian Filat gave a news conference where they accused the Chisinau City Hall of illegally managing the pay parking lots projects and explained the scheme. On February 23 this year, the draft regulations on the functioning of pay parking lots in Chisinau municipality appeared on the agenda of the CMC meeting. The draft decision was rejected and municipal councilors and civic activists sounded the alarm and warned that this a new attempt by the City Hall to legalize the public-private partnership contract with EME Parkleitsystem.
On April 25, deputy mayor Nistor Grozavu was escorted to the National Anticorruption Center as a suspect. The functionary is suspected of misuse of power in the case of pay parking lots and was placed under arrest for 72 hours initially. The same day, the head of the City Hall’s Transport Division Igor Gamretski and another five persons were arrested in the same case.
The authors of the article note Dorin Chirtoaca cannot say that he knew nothing about the draft decision or the public-private partnership contract with EME Parkleitsystem because he confirmed in a number of programs and interviews that he discussed with representatives of this company. Thus, he could have made the acquaintance of “living people from Europe” only after the commission decided to choose the operator, which is starting with October 4, 2015, when he added the draft decision on the approval of the contract to the agenda of the CMC meeting.
The conclusion of the Sic! authors is that Dorin Chirtoaca knew about the pay parking lots project and about EME Parkleitsystem. Moreover, he knew that Nistor Grozavu signed the contract without the approval of the CMC.
The full article in the Romanian can be found on sic.md. Sic! is a project implemented by IPN News Agency with support from Soros Foundation Moldova.
