Sofia Municipality Terminates Contract with Cleaning Concessionaire

All 54 municipal councilmen voted yes Monday on the proposal, submitted by the Mayor of Sofia, Boyko Borisov, to terminate the contract with the concessionaire in charge of cleaning the capital. Photo by Nadya Kotseva (Sofia Photo Agency)

The Sofia Municipal Council decided during an emergency meeting Monday to terminate the contract with the concessionaire in charge of cleaning the capital, the "Novera" company.

The contract will be terminated around April 1. There is a two-week deadline to prepare a legal analysis of the agreement between the company and the Municipality, including analysis of the possibilities for early annulment.

The decision was made by a solid majority vote of the 54 municipal councilmen. The proposal was submitted by the Mayor of Sofia, Boyko Borisov.

"According to the preliminary legal analysis prepared by the Deputy Mayor for Security and Public Order, Yulia Nenkova, there would be no reason for "Novera" to sue the Municipality, but knowing Bulgaria's justice system and our adversary, I would not be surprised to see us thrown in a legal battle. Even if we hire an independent consultant to prepare the legal analysis, we still can get sued. The decision must be such so that the Municipality does not get stuck in some different predicament," Borisov told reporters from the BGNES news agency before the meeting.

The vote came on the heals of problems with the waste removal in several of the city's districts, including Sofia's downtown, which since Saturday has been buried under piles of trash, overflowing from waste disposals.

"Novera" claims they halted the garbage removal because they had not received the payments owed them by the City Hall. The Municipality insists that they have transferred all overdue amounts and the concessionaire was blackmailing them.

City Prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov announced earlier on Monday that at the request of the Mayor of Sofia, a probe of the Bulgarian prosecutor's office will seek to find out whether the garbage that littered the streets of the capital over the weekend posed a risk to human health.

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