The Sofia Municipal Council (SOC) will meet emergency today for public transport in Sofia, BTA reported.
Municipal councilors will consider a report on the granting of monetary loans by the Metropolitan Municipality to “Stolichen autotransport” EAD and “Metropolitan Electric Transport” EAD for repayment of accrued liabilities as of August 31, 2024. This is clear from the agenda published on the website of the Metropolitan Municipality.
BTA recalls that at the end of last week, the mayor of Sofia, Vasil Terziev, announced that the accounts of "Stolichen autotransport" were blocked. EAD. Then he explained that the company has piled up more than BGN 20 million in liabilities over the years. The municipal councilor from the group of "We continue the change - Democratic Bulgaria" ("Save Sofia") Boris Bonev said that the incident that caused the seizure of the accounts of the Capital Transport was related to the repair of the dormitory for the employees of the city transport in “Druzhba”. It turned out that the materials for the repair were taken at prices 20-30 times higher than the standard price, explained Bonev. At the moment when this incident became public, the management of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided to literally freeze this repair, he added.
The future of Metropolitan transport was one of the main topics at the meeting of the Metropolitan Municipal Council (SOC) last week. On Monday, it became known that the chairman of the Sofia Municipal Council, Tsvetomir Petrov, is convening an extraordinary meeting on October 3 to consider a proposal by the Mayor of Sofia to grant a loan of BGN 6 million for transport in Sofia.
It is expected that at the upcoming extraordinary meeting of the SOS, a solution will be found for public transport in Sofia that will satisfy everyone and help the companies, Vasil Terziev said yesterday.
Later, the GERB-SDS group in SOS proposed an update of the amount of the loan that the Capital Municipality will grant to the transport companies in Sofia. According to the report of the mayor of Sofia, Vasil Terziev, the obligations of the transport operators are BGN 30 million, the loan proposal is 1/5 of that. We at GERB-SDS do not accept this amount within BGN 6 million and propose to work on increasing it by about three times. This was said by the municipal councilor from the GERB-SDS group Proshko Proshkov.
The municipal councilors from GERB-SDS explained that the update of the report is also to be considered at extraordinary meetings of the finance and budget committee, the economy, property and digital transformation committee and the transport and road safety committee, after which it will be also examined by the Metropolitan Municipal Council.