The county councilor Raul Olajos, the leader of REPER Timiş and a surprise candidate for the Timisoara City Hall, accused the Fritz administration of gross incompetence, immorality and lack of transparency on the PRESSALERT LIVE show.
Olajos, who was recently in the USR on the PLUS branch, offered concrete examples that he considers undemocratic and which led him to leave the political formation. “I’ve been saying for years, it’s not like I woke up yesterday that I don’t agree with certain USR practices. I entered into dissidence very quickly, to use a historical term like that, but in any case I detached myself quite quickly from certain methods of democratic form… For example, we are talking about elections within the branches in the county. Taking the status of the USR, they simply allowed the transfer of members. If there was a need for a voting table in Lugoj, where we had a solid branch, me coming on the side of PLUS in this alliance, we found that a hundred or so people had moved from Jamu Mare, for example , and they voted for the president. Distribution according to interests. It didn’t even matter where you were solidly in a UAT, where those people represented the voice of that UAT and potential voters and supporters of a potential candidate. It mattered that if the total number of USR members was more than the number of PLUS members, they won absolutely all the elections. And in Jamu Mare they had a branch where half of the electoral register was a member… With a mass of voters from there, they ensured their victory in Giroc, which was an important UAT, where we also had a solid branch in Lugoj. With a configuration like this, if this is democratic, then I have reservations!”, said Raul Olajos at PRESSALERT LIVE.
When asked who pulls the strings at the local level in USR, the REPER candidate answered: “It is clear that it is the core team of the mayor: Sorin Şipoş – Reşitnec – Fritz – Trifan. Drula appears meteorically but is anchored in Timişoara and from here he got all the juice inside the USR at the national level. When there was a problem, he used the large Timiş county branch. You can also include those in the II category. Gen Laţcau… I don’t want to upset him. I have reservations that he is in the core team, if you ask me”.
“I saw the recent release of the current mayor, in which he said that he did nothing illegal and immoral. I can say that his mandate began with an immoral action, when he did not respect a protocol signed with the alliance colleagues. Ruben Laţcau was not supposed to be the deputy mayor of Timisoara and it is a clear thing, we can judge as much as we want with the alternative competences. But he did something on that one… We accepted because at that time our national leadership was focused on forming a government and they never gave us an alternative. Things were simple. Dominic Fritz told me in black and white: Whatever happens as I want – to have a man I trust. Or if not, it will happen anyway, because the vices are voted in a majority. In other words, he assumed the non-compliance with the protocol without giving us the right of option. And we, at that time, from a political point of view, I was told that we cannot afford to dynamit the newly elected mayor because we are not satisfied with a certain position. With the so-called compensation, we were granted some formal positions of commission presidents or group leaders, which did not even have the consistency of an executive power…”, said Olajos.
The county councilor claims that those from the USR did not apply the slogans put forward and by their actions practically relaunched Nicolae Robu to the headquarters on CD Loga: “Beyond the legal aspects, I see it as non-transparent. They are slogans, they don’t respect at least three axes that we built absolutely determinedly… I said that we don’t call it political. And the first thing he did was to put trusted people in various positions where, we all know, various kinds of contests were simulated, in order to justify those people in those positions. Accidentally, people from the management of the USR, even explicitly county and local, became the decision-makers in certain subordinates or structures of the town hall. You don’t have to be a genius or a monk to see something wrong there. The second aspect we targeted, related to meritocracy and the professionalization of the City Hall. How do they differ from other people taken at random from the professional pool of Timiş county? They didn’t promote the best people and they didn’t even promote the best people even from within the political organization. Many became demotivated and left. What does transparency mean when all decisions are made by them in a closed group. You call your city manager brought from I don’t know where after simulating a competition of hundreds of CVs. One of my collaborators whom I hope to engage in a potential win of the executive within the City Hall is away on a very large contract in Brussels with an impeccable CV. He submitted, you know, his name is Harry Muller, he’s really German… we have our Germans. His CV looks five times better than that of the current city manager… You have no performance criteria almost anywhere in the organizational charts you promote. You fail to show me indicators of solvency and creditworthiness in any of the city hall’s subordinates that are comparatively solid compared to what the previous administration had. And the biggest criticism I would make is that the current administration is so weak that it gave a chance to the former administration to return to power. What seems to me relevant and decisive in concluding the competences of the current administration. It is at least so dusty that today it has a statistical chance, we know it from polls and from the public environment, that the former administration will return. Which is very rare in political statistics. Usually when you fail, the chances of coming back are very small. But today the former team has a statistical chance. He delivered almost nothing he promised (no Fritz). Six months after taking over the mandate, we started telling them explicitly inside the branch that it would lead to a colossal failure.
It’s one thing to try your best and it doesn’t work out, it’s another to close yourself off from the voices around you so you can focus on what you don’t know.”
“I asked for one thing. I also coordinated the public policy team within PLUS. I said that the first thing we have to do is to take that manual of that Revolution of good governance, the candidacy manual, with which we said we are revolutionizing urban planning, mobility… and to follow step by step what we have to do. Otherwise, those are just some concepts thrown on paper, on a very tempting powerpoint: You do it, we don’t have time, we have executive elements to set up… well, executive elements after you guide yourself. According to the goals you set for yourself? Or you knocked them out of a strategy that sounds good, with six consultants, who define excellent concepts and terms but which in reality cannot be achieved because they are not measurable and specific. In other words, they started to attack me internally: Sir, no, that guy was coming out with his theories… As if he had managerial experience. Who is telling me this? People like Ruben Laţcau, who led three people, not thousands, like me in 20 years. Like Mrs. Militaru, who has no managerial experience, maybe at the concept level when she was teaching what she was teaching at the university, but operationally she has never seen a budget execution in her life. Maybe he at least looked at a langoserie, what a credit means. Sorin Puşcaş, who is in fact a political praetorian guard of the mayor with entrepreneurial skills opposite whom I have great reservations. With figures that don’t back me up, but that were playing such a sham, theatrical game, in which we show great compassion, but in reality we reject everything, anyway, to make sure that it doesn’t bother the supreme leader. In other words, they started doing the same thing they did when I showed my intention to run internally, to deconstruct any kind of variable and criticism, which attention was internal. Before we showed the precariousness of certain steps and directions, we formally put inside the organization and such a dialogue was refused. All that was left for me was to assume publicly, he did not make the promise as a public person, we USR PLUS, I was also the leader of the group of county councilors”, continued Olajos. He admitted that he regrets the trust he had at the beginning: “Today, retroactively, yes, and not Dominic Fritz, that I believed in a project built in Timisoara around Dominic Fritz, which turned out to be a failure.”
Accused at one point of playing Alin Nica’s games, Olajos explained how “the entire USR was destroyed at a concerted level”, the one who turned from an enemy into an ally for the userists: “And when I followed the protocol and was reproached : you see that you are making a deal with Nica, that I have to attack him. To go in line with the approach of the party, which made him: a peasant from Dudeşti, integrity problems, the Dubai business, a lot of dynasty. And for me, that I went in a delegation as the president of the external relations committee with other colleagues of mine. I was reproached that I have nothing to do without the consent of the party, so what role do I have there… aberrations like this. That I make Alin Nica’s games, after which he is good today, he no longer has integrity problems, that’s why they made him a candidate, he no longer has problems with business, I respected a protocol. They do nothing but validate the moderate collaborative approach that we also had with the PSD…”.
As for the Nica-Fritz collaboration: “I’m curious how our reformist, corporatist electorate sees it, in which we anchored ourselves, which we represent, in which we come and say that we don’t do like them. I can’t see it at all, it’s an ostrich-camel… in which nothing is delivered to anyone. From a progressive-reformist line, it moved to a quasi-conservative approach that no longer satisfies either the conservatives or the progressives. There’s no way… That doesn’t mean you’re doing politics differently and it doesn’t make you more credible”.
Olajos believes that the current administration was simply incompetent in dealing with the Colterm problem and not only that. “At the beginning of taking over Colterm I was asked for a point of view to try to help. I was busy for a very short time. God allowed me to have Covid and not have time to deal with it. I was away for two weeks, they made some decisions from within a group that I was not a part of. The reality is that Colterm was taken over, I say this as a judicial expert, in a state of insolvency, three undeclared insolvencies. The lack of experience in taking over a mammoth with such flows, in which the pressure was very high from the gas suppliers, there were outstanding rates, pressure from all sides. Taking over from one day to the next… The only solution they had was either to ensure financing through the famous technological losses, tens of millions of lei, or to put themselves under legal protection, to ask for insolvency, that’s where they ended up. At a time when all they did was to issue invoices, when they didn’t, there were tax declarations from various authorities, such as those of the Environment, which charged their liabilities. This shows that they entered with amateurs. And worst of all, they entered the executive with Laţcau, Reşitnec and Şipoş, when they still had professionals there, who had managed complicated situations in their private lives, but they don’t come with a propaganda speech in which we want to do good to the citizens, but you interrupt the neck. They come when they trust the one who decides, the credit orderer, when there is a backup behind them, not when you are given bits of information. They ended up in insolvency, and from insolvency things are much more complicated… The degree of indebtedness was high (…) It’s not so serious if it were only this problem. I guarantee you that all the subordinates of the City Hall, STPT, SDM, are equally amateurishly managed. I know what I’m talking about, I’m a professional. It’s not propaganda, I’ve done indicator analyzes and the vast majority of the analyzes are in a worse state than before. Concretely, come to Verde, Albinelor, Stuparilor streets and I will show you that there are the same potholes as in 2016, 2018,… worse, go along three of five main boulevards and you will dismantle your car, from one pothole to another, this means that the SDM is not able to pave even its basic arteries. We do dynasty events of closed roads for the community, in which we do bread and circus shows, but we don’t close a route to asphalt from one curb to another. If he did that, one per quarter, today you would have dozens of smooth asphalted roads and it would not cost 1.6 million lei to organize the asphalting show. But that means not having a vision of implementation, and they have no way, because in their private lives neither he nor Laţcau did anything to implement elements, they only talked about them, read, in two languages, but did not – have ever materialized”, Olajos concluded.
Tags: mandate began immoral action amateurism administration Timisoara
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