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Bucharest District 1 mayor Clotilde Armand says she will no longer tolerate the blackmail of the "garbage mafia", and if waste management company Romprest Service SA refuses to honor its contractual obligations, then another operator will take over, as a matter of urgency, reads a press release of the mayor's office sent to AGERPRES on Sunday.
"If this company leaves the garbage on the streets again and refuses to honor its contractual obligations of 12.02.2020, another operator will take over as a matter of urgency. I assure all the inhabitants of District 1 that we will not go through the situation we were in last month. I will no longer tolerate blackmail and the threats of the garbage mafia. District 1 pays for sanitation even 10 times more expensive than the rest of the country. District 1 City Hall has been an honest partner, District 1 City Hall is not a tap with money for their cross-party offshore. I won't tolerate them anymore," said Clotilde Armand, according to the cited source.
The release further shows that Armand requested Romprest, through a notification, to provide, as a matter of urgency, all the information and data necessary to verify the quantity of services actually provided and to draw up again the tax invoices in order to correlate their value with the services performed.
Romprest notified the Local Council of District 1 that it could temporarily limit the sanitation service from February 11, noting that the contracting authority is violating its contractual obligations.
"We have been unpaid for over 6 months, starting with July 2020, all our financial resources to support the continuous provision of the service have been exhausted or are drying up and if no payments are recorded, we are going to stop providing the service. (...) The Romprest vehicles have been circulating on the main boulevards (...) to publicize that it is not because of Romprest that there is a possibility that we will not be able to go to work on Thursday, but due to lack of funds for the purchase of fuel, for the payment of salaries and of the service providers that help us and implicitly the City Hall to provide the sanitation service," the operational director of Romprest, Sorin Velicu, told AGERPRES on Sunday.
According to him, in case no payments are made, insolvency proceedings follow.
He specified that District 1 City Hall must pay Romprest over 100 million lei for services provided. "We do not invoice until we have the service confirmed," said Sorin Velicu.
