The district heating system is collapsing, in conditions where ELCEN, the company of the Ministry of Energy, has to collect over 1.25 billion lei from Termoenergetica, money that it did not receive from the General City Hall and announced that it must enter insolvency, according to the law, said, on Wednesday, the Minister of Energy, Sebastian Burduja, in a press conference.
„The district heating system itself is collapsing. ELCEN, the company of the Ministry of Energy, has over 1.25 billion lei to collect. The city hall has not paid Termoenergetica, its own company, either, which is why, the other day, the management of Termoenergetica wrote to the mayor general, because the law obliges it, that it must enter insolvency. So, the administrators of Termoenergetica, respecting the law, informed Mr. Nicuşor Dan that the company is entering insolvency. And Mr. Creţu (the general director of ELCEN – editor’s note) will present you with figures related to the payments made by the city hall to ELCEN and you will see some things that may surprise you, maybe you know them, but I believe that all Romanians should know them, especially since now Mr. Nicusor Dan is coming to ask for the vote of Romanians, all Romanians, not just „to the people of Bucharest,” said Burduja.
According to him, Bucharest is also heading „with rapid steps towards bankruptcy” after five years under the administration of Nicusor Dan, its debts being around 4.7 billion RON.
„Today, the Capital is on the verge of budgetary collapse (…) I watched Mr. Nicuşor Dan’s conference through the drops, announced so untimely, just before our conference, but there’s no problem. And he said one thing, I liked it. The only thing I liked about his conference rang true, namely that a presidential candidate must be judged by his deeds, not by his image. It seemed interesting to me. And I looked at his deeds (…) and we see that we are talking about this 1.2 billion lei debt that the General City Hall has and that according to the Law on Local Public Finances, when you have a debt older than 90 days and this debt exceeds 15% of the budgeted expenses for that year (…) and I am convinced that my colleagues in the General Council will demand recognition of this situation (…) Moreover, if we add up all the current debts of Bucharest, we see that we reach somewhere around 4.7 billion lei (…) which is almost half of the budget for the current year, and according to the same Law 273/2006, article 75 paragraph 1, letter a) this means a state of insolvency. So, Bucharest is heading with rapid steps after 5 years of Nicusor Dan’s administration towards bankruptcy. It’s as if he pulled Bucharest out of bankruptcy. However, when we look at the figures, this statement is obviously a lie. Mr. Nicusor Dan has the impression that if he repeats a lie enough times it becomes the truth, but the figures and mathematics do not lie. And, without scaring anyone, the people of Bucharest should not be surprised if in the near future, under the leadership of Mr. Nicusor Dan, we will end up having forced executions of their assets, because they are people’s assets, public assets, not Nicusor Dan’s assets,” the head of Energy pointed out.
In his opinion, the mayor of the capital is running for president because he is running away from Bucharest’s problems and is overwhelmed by the situation.
„Analyzing things very carefully, a question haunted me: after last year’s elections, in December, when Mr. Nicusor Dan announced his candidacy for the presidency of Romania one evening, I wondered why. Why is Nicuşor Dan running for the presidency of Romania? (…) And I realized that Mr. Nicusor Dan is running because he is simply outnumbered. He is running away from Bucharest’s problems, he has no way to solve them, he has no way to fool the people of Bucharest after almost five years,” the minister said.
Sebastian Burduja believes that Nicusor Dan is the politician who, after 1989, raised cold showers to the rank of public policy.
„Today we are at one of the four CETs in Bucharest. Every winter we pray to God to help us keep these 60-70 year old beasts in working order so that the people of Bucharest have some hot water and heat and, when they don’t, it will be because of the state of the district heating network and not because of ELCEN. And in the cold season we went through, ELCEN once again did its job. The people from ELCEN made sure that all these installations, all this equipment from the 60s-70s worked for another winter. Unfortunately, at this moment, right now as we speak, it is one of the common situations in Bucharest: one in five Bucharesters does not have hot water. If you look at the Termo Alert application, you will see this. The state system is 81% red. And if we look at the map on the application, the red dots on the map, are families of Bucharest residents, there are elderly people, there are small children, there are people who woke up in the morning and wanted to take a shower and took a cold shower. In fact, Mr. Nicusor Dan is the politician, because he became a politician, the politician who after 1989 raised cold showers to the rank of public policy. This is the sad reality,” said Burduja.
In turn, the mayor of the capital, Nicusor Dan, declared on Wednesday, also in a press conference, that the debts between the City Hall and Termoenergetica will be settled during the year.
„Between the City Hall of the Capital and Termoenergetica, as at the beginning of every year, there are debts that will be paid off during the year, because in the winter months there are large bills, much larger than the money that we receive through the generosity of the Government from the taxes of Bucharest residents. And then we accumulate debts in the winter, which we later pay off until the summer months when we pay Termoenergetica much more than the bill of 10-15 million during the summer months. (…) What has changed now is that the Government formed around the PSD has redistributed much less money to us from the income taxes of Bucharest residents, despite the referendum that Bucharest residents voted for,” said the mayor.
He was asked how he sees the scenario of Termoenergetica entering insolvency, advanced by the Minister of Energy, Sebastian Burduja.
„We are politicians with a mandate from the citizens and each of us must act as responsibly as possible towards the citizens. I would like to pay a billion lei now to the Termoenergetica company, so that the company can continue to pay to ELCEN. We do not have this money, because a Government has ignored the will of the Bucharest residents and is making this City Hall a kind of payment office, to make only mandatory movements. We must pay for public transport, the public transport subsidy so that the Bucharest residents can travel by public transport, we must pay for the essential elements, not the investments, I repeat, for the operation of hospitals, we must pay for the minimal maintenance of green spaces. As I told you, we have blocked investments in repairing playgrounds, we have allocated much less money to the banks of the lake in Herăstrău and we stopped many investments in hospitals because there is no money. That’s it. There is no money!”, added Nicusor Dan.
AGERPRES
