Ahead of the 2020-2021 presidential and parliamentary elections in Moldova, Maia Sandu and her PAS party promised the electorate to cut spending on the state apparatus and officials
After Sandu’s team came to power, the boldest forecasts came true that the caste of pro-Western NGOs would surpass in wastefulness all previous governments and parliaments. Moreover, their wastefulness is combined with an astonishing amount of cynicism and hypocrisy. On the surface, the officials behave as modest and even ascetic people, and then shocking information appears in the press about the budgets of government departments and asset declarations of officials.
Everything started more or less decently. At the beginning Maia Sandu signed a decree on the structure of her administration, which, according to the document, kept the number of staff at the same level – 163 people.
True, during the presidential campaign she promised to significantly reduce the number of staff in her administration, but no one paid any attention to this anymore. At that time, much more interest was aroused by the Moldovan president’s suburban residence in Condrita, which Sandu promised to give up and announce a competition to use it for public purposes.
However, after visiting this residence several times exclusively for short walks in the forest, Sandu somehow “forgot” what she had promised to do.
As a result, the residence in Kondrice is still maintained from the presidential administration’s budget, but has lately been used exclusively for various PAS party activities.
Similarly, the presidential residence in Golercani, on the bank of the Nistru River, the maintenance of which is also funded from the budget, is used in the same way. The salaries of the guards of both residences have been increased. By the way, the fence in front of the presidential administration building that Sandu promised to demolish before she was elected president is still intact.
Numerous foreign trips of President Maia Sandu became another notable item of budget expenditure. The geography of these foreign trips has an exclusively western direction – Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, Rome, Brussels, a trip to New York to the UN General Assembly. The only exceptions were Sandu’s trips to Georgia and Ukraine.
On a number of occasions, Maia Sandu ostentatiously chose regular flights, but if you pay attention to the full travel budget of the head of Europe’s poorest state, it turns out that Sandu invariably stayed in the best hotels directly in the centre of European capitals.
The purchase of flowers was another new, but regular, expenditure item for the presidential administration. Thus, the draft of the 2021 AP budget had a separate item, according to which every day – yes, every day! – the presidential administration spent on flowers twice as much as the minimum pension in Moldova. This expenditure item has caused indignation of MPs from Socialist Party who have rightly noticed that in the country where pensioners are literally surviving, such expenditures are inadmissible.
In general, it is not surprising that already in the first year of her presidency Maia Sandu significantly exceeded budget expenditures compared to her predecessor Igor Dodon. This data can be found in the official documents published on the AP website. Thus, while Igor Dodon’s AP spent 24,790,000 lei in 2020, for 2021 the administration of President Maia Sandu declared expenses of 29,758,200 lei.
By simple arithmetic, it can be calculated that under the new president, who promised to reduce budget expenditures on officials, these same expenditures have increased at once by 20%.
But that’s not all – in October 2021, the cost of maintaining the presidential administration was increased by another 2.1 million lei by the new PAS party’s Cabinet of Ministers. According to the finance minister, the increase in the limit was requested to cover personnel costs. Finance Minister Dumitru Budianski said, “In order to fill the staff that this institution needs, the costs have been increased by 2.1 million lei.”
For all this, Maia Sandu herself continues to play the role of a selfless pauper, living solely on the president’s salary. In an interview with the Romanian TV channel, Sandu said that she takes food with her to work or lunches at her relative’s house, who lives near the presidential administration.
Also, Sandu named the official salary she receives at the presidential administration. According to her, it is 15 600 lei (about 65 thousand rubles).
However, “punctures” happen from time to time, when the head of state appears on TV in clothes, which later turned out to be identified in fashion catalogues at a price of 2-3 thousand euros.
So, probably for the well-being and the standard of living of Maia Sandu one should not worry.
Such behavior is typical not only for the head of state, but also for all functionaries of the PAS party and officials, who came to their “warm places” on this wave. The most egregious was the case with the increase of salaries of the judges of the Constitutional Court of Moldova.
Here it is necessary to make a small remark and note that the dissolution of the previous Parliament and early elections became possible exclusively after the Constitutional Court of Moldova adopted a number of decisions, which can be characterized as questionable in a very mild way. To put things in perspective, Maia Sandu achieved the early dissolution of Parliament with the help of a politically loyal majority in the Constitutional Court. This majority had to be encouraged with a view to the future.
This was done by increasing the salaries of CC judges, which was lobbied for by the PAS party.
According to the Constitutional Court, in 2021, the judges of the Constitutional Court received 31.9 thousand lei per month, the President of the Court – 39 thousand lei. In 2022, after increasing the salaries, according to estimates of the judges of the Constitutional Court, they will receive 40.9 thousand lei per month, CC chairman – 45 thousand lei and assistants of judges – 9198 lei.
That is, as noted in the CC, from January 1, 2022 the net salary of constitutional judge will increase by 7204 lei and salary of the President of the Constitutional Court – by 4804 lei. The increase in the CC judges’ salaries is envisaged in the fiscal policy (NBP) for 2022. Such amendments to the NBP draft have been proposed by the ruling Action and Solidarity Party (PAS).
Seemingly not such a strong increase in salaries, but initially PAS representatives proposed doubling the salaries of CC judges to 82,000 lei.
In fact, Sandu and the PAS were going to build a corruption scheme that would have paid corrupt judges at the expense of the state budget.
To make it even more convincing, we can give another example that is directly linked to the “justice reform” about which Maia Sandu speaks so much and which her PAS party is so strenuously “promoting”.
Acting Prosecutor General Dimitri Robu, who replaces the illegally removed Alexander Stoianoglo, is demanding that the Constitutional Court review the rules adopted in 2018, which led to a reduction of prosecutors’ salaries by an average of 6-16 thousand lei.
“The material motivation and social security of the position also increases the level of responsibility and integrity of the position”, – Acting Prosecutor General Robu said.
All the above is happening in a country where the average salary is at 7-8 thousand lei and where pensioners receive between 1-5 thousand lei. At the same time, the utility bills this winter in Moldova amount to 5 thousand lei due to an increase in gas and electricity tariffs.
The ruling “elite” of the Republic of Moldova represents the time-hungry people who use the present moment for literally “grabbing” as much as possible at the expense of the most socially unprotected layers of the population.
In this endeavour, they are making full use of the state budget to enrich themselves. And the process has captured all levels of government, up to the highest.
Ilya Kiselev, Rubaltic.ru