CHISINAU AIRPORT CONCESSION WILL LOSE FORCE IF MOLDOVA PROVES THAT AGREEMENT WAS BASED ON FRAUD – ECONOMY MINISTER BRINZAN

The concession of the Chisinau International Airport will lose legal force if Moldova manages to prove that the Agreement on passing the Airport into a 49-year-long concession to a foreign company was based on a fraud, Moldova’s Minister of Economy and Infrastructure Vadim Brinzan stated on the local television Wednesday.

According to him, the Moldovan Government has in fact several legal levers that can be used for breaking up the Concession Agreement concluded with the Avia Invest Company.

The Minister said that at buying an air ticket, each passenger pays an additional tax of 9 euros, and this tax brings annually some 20 million euros to the company.

“So, during the 4 years of the airport concession, passengers have paid 75-80 million euros to Avia Invest – a sum sufficient to build a new airport in Moldova”, said the Minister.

According to the Concession Agreement, this tax shall be paid by every air passenger for 45 more years.

As was already reported by Infotag, the 9-euro tax on every ticket was introduced by the Moldovan Government, when it took from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) a credit for Chisinau airport modernization. The purpose of the tax was to alleviate the credit burden on the Moldovan State Budget. Since then, the EBRD credit has been repaid long ago, but the 9-euro tax continues to be traditionally charged on every sold ticket, and the airport concessioner, Avia Invest, habitually accepts the marvelous money.

Infotag’s dossier: In 2013, the Government of Premier Iurie Leanca decided to pass the state-owned enterprise “Chisinau International Airport” into a 49-year-long concession to Avia Invest Company of Russia, which won a corresponding international contest then. According to the concession agreement signed shortly after, the foreign concessionaire is supposed to invest not less than 244.2 million euros in airport development, and the size of rent must be not less than 1% of sale revenues.

In May 2015, then-Prime Minister Chiril Gaburici demanded from the National Anti-Corruption Center (NACC) and the Ministry of the Interior to start an investigation into the passing of the Chisinau airport into concession in 2013. In his belief, the Government of Iurie Leanca was misled concerning the terms of the concession, “whose consequences have inflicted a particularly grave damage to the Moldovan State”.

Opponents to the concession agreement have many a time challenged it in courts. On their initiatives, commissions were formed to check the legitimacy of governmental decisions, but none of such commissions has found violations at decision taking or in meeting concession commitments by the Russian concessionaire.