Siarhei Verameyenka: Government Fiddling With Utilities Interest

Meanwhile, it’s the Belarusian families who will have to payu for all these “tricks”.

Representative of the Belarusian National Congress in Hrodna Siarhei Verameyenka told this to the website Charter97.org, commenting on the information that the authorities have been preparing the reform of housing for four years and then decided that it was not needed:

— It is very difficult to comment on the absurd. In our country, officials and specialists are recruited not for their professional qualities, but for their loyalty. What else can you expect from such people?

It is clear that there is no practical benefit for the state, that our housing and communal services structure will improve.The whole system of Lukashenka is built in such a way that this pyramid works only on the loyalty of the lower official to the superior one, thus they will not succeed no matter what they do.

All this leads us to a dead end. The authorities can slow down a bit, may stay on loans for a while, but still it's a road to a deadlock. There cannot be any modernization under the current government.

They continue to fool us with interest on payment for the utility services. Siamashka says it’s 16%, which we pay only for heating. The authorities try to fiddle with interest. There are no specific, assigned numbers. This system means that we will still pay for all these "heating pipeline breaks".

I can give you an example. A few years ago I was an observer at the "elections" in Hrodna and, to put it this way, a young guy, a master from the utility services administration, was were to “balance” me. He made some urgent phone calls in my presence, ordered a net.

I learned from him that a pipe broke through in the city. In order not to show people that something had happened, they urgently searched for a camouflage net in some military unit. They wanted to cover the pipe, so as not to show that everything is done in a bad way. This is the absurdity in which we all live.