Arrears for utilities amount to 4.3 billion rubles in Bashkortostan

UFA, 11 December 2018. /Bashinform News Agency, Azat Gizatullin/ translated by Tatiana Aksyutina/.

As of November 1, the debt for utilities amounted to 4.3 billion rubles in the republic, which is 22% more than at the beginning of the year. Of these, 19 million rubles are debts for gas, 1.11 billion - for the supplied electricity, 3.1 billion - for heat and hot water supply. “Half of these over four billions are accounted for the population of the republic,” said the Interim Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Housing and Utilities of Bashkortostan Mikhail Kireev at a coordination meeting on ensuring law and order in the republic. According to him, in 2018 a restriction was imposed on the supply of utilities in relation to 134 thousand apartments. Resource supplying organizations filed lawsuits for 705 million rubles for the supplied heat and electricity. The Interim Minister of Housing and Utilities believes that in order to solve the debt problem, it is necessary to intensify work on switching to direct contracts with the population, to intensify work on identifying unscrupulous management companies.

The prosecutor of the republic Andrey Nazarov said that the overdue debt for utilities was one of the main problems with which the supervisory agency was actively working. Management companies referred to non-payment of consumers and did not pay to resource supplying enterprises.

Acting Head of Bashkortostan Radiy Khabirov noted that the republic was among top ten Russian regions by the level of payment discipline by the population for housing and utilities. According to the capital's mayor Ulfat Mustafin it is 97% in Ufa.

The Head of Bashkortostan recalled that the residents' debts had accumulated because of malicious defaulters, mostly socially unstable, who had debts of 200-300 thousand rubles, and called for more stringent measures to be applied to them.

“As for management companies that do not transfer money collected from the population to resource supplying companies, this illegal activity should be stopped. This is a big Russian sore and we should combat it”, said Radiy Khabirov.