TRANSNISTRIAN GOVERNMENT: SITUATION AT WATER AND ELECTRICITY ENTERPRISES IS CRITICAL

The situation at enterprises of water, heating and electricity supply is shocking and approaches critical, said unrecognized Transnistrian Moldovan republic (PMR) government chairman Alexander Martynov in an interview to the Transnistrian TV channel.

Summarizing his visits to region’s energy enterprises, he said that if the situation is not resolved in the nearest possible time, 3-5 years later the region risks to arrive to the man-made disaster.

According to the premier, the network deterioration is almost 100%, and enterprises do not have money for capital repairing and replacement of engineering infrastructure.

As for the reasons of the occurred situation, he recognized that the state did not compensate to enterprises the incentives on communal service payments, thus public organizations accumulated big arrears on services.

“Tariffs should be economically justified and should cover costs so that enterprises to develop, to be able to conduct capital repairs and to replace necessary equipment and networks. The state policy should be socially-directed. That is the state has to compensate the losses from incentives. This has not been done by the authorities for long time and they just spent out our engineering infrastructure, hiding behind slogans about social politics, care about citizens”, Martynov said.

He said that today, urgent meetings are being conducted for seeking ways out of the situation.

“How to correct the situation? We should start paying. There cannot be free meals in economy. We have to seek hundreds of millions of rubles, otherwise everything risks to molder away and people risk to remain without water and electricity”, the head of the government concluded.

As Infotag has already reported, tariffs on communal services in the region are several times lower than in Moldova and do not cover enterprises’ production costs. This is due to the populist policy of Transnistrian authorities, which in this way are trying to improve the citizens’ social protection and make the produced goods competitive. They are not paying for the Russian gas since 2009, directing consumers’ payments to budget replenishment. As a result, the region’s debts exceeded US$6 billion.