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Guilty-Not-guilty and “Telephone Went Wrong”

March 22, 2007

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Who has swallowed an allowance on telephone fees? Electro-communication department blames the municipality. The later is not going to pay the money. People, who have allowances on their telephone bills, have to wait when it is found out who is guilty and who is not in their problem.

Three lari allowances on telephone bills were granted to 409 people in Akhaltsikhe and Vale. Those lucky people were veterans and disabled people of the Great Patriotic War, participants of the civil wars, families who had lost bread-winners and those who had similar problems. 44 families of repressed people enjoyed the allowance as well.

“We have no debt to the state, just the opposite; the state owes us some money. We are being punished because of irresponsibility of the local authority,” said veterans.

“My telephone has been cut off for more than a week. We found out that subscribers have allocated old debts and the municipality refuses to pay it. Do we have any fault in it? They tell us at the post office that unless we pay the money, they would not turn on the telephone,” said Aleksandre Arutiniani, whose father is a veteran of war and military forces.

“I badly need telephone. I have high blood pressures every night and I need telephone on to call for the medical aid,” complained eighty-seven-year-old veteran, Sebo Saghateliani.

“Some of them are disabled people, the others are sick and lonely people, and several of them are bed-bounded and live in the poorest conditions. If we got worse, we would not be able to call anyone,” said William Petrosian.

The reason to cut off the telephones was allocated debts which must be paid to the electro-communication department by the Akhaltsikhe Municipality.

“The municipality was to pay 3 680 GEL for telephone bill for the previous months-October, November and December. Initially they were waiting for elections: “Let us finish the elections!” they used to say. After that they stated “We are not well-established yet.” The bills were to be paid at the end of every three months. We petitioned to the Municipality late in December and they promised to pay the bills. Although they had voted though the 2007 budget they finally refused to pay the money. Gia Kapanadze, the head of the Financial-Budget Service Department said that the municipality was not going to pay the bills. Consequently we had to cut off the line,” said Shota Beridze, the Head of the Akhaltsikhe Electro-Communication Department.

Veterans applied to the Akhaltsikhe Municipality to find out the situation. They said that Kapanadze promised them to transfer money to cover their telephone bills in vain.

Kapanadze said that since October 12, the whole municipality staff had been working in liquidation regime. Thus they could not pay the bills.

Shalva Dalalishvili, deputy Governor of the Akhaltsikhe Municipality answered us whether the funds would be apportioned to pay allocated debt.

“While we worked in liquidation regime we stopped all sorts of bank activities either. The fund for the telephone bills was transferred to the social packet of the next year budget. We cannot apportion that sum at present. It is abusing of our power,” said he.

According to Dalalishvili there is only one way out.

“The subscribers who have been granted with allowances can appeal to the court. The court will find out who is guilty and who is not. If the court concludes that the municipality should pay the money, we would obey the verdict,” said Deputy Governor.

Gulo Kokhodze, Akhaltsikhe  

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