Nastase, “We Will Make Every Effort to Ensure that the Minimum Pension Is More than 2500 Lei”

The leader of the DA Platform party, Andrei Năstase, who was registered as a candidate to run in the November 1 presidential elections, claims that he will make every effort to ensure that the minimum pension in Moldova is more than 2500 lei. According to him, about 3.5 billion lei is needed to achieve this goal, and this money can be found and contributed to the state budget, ipn.md reports. “We plan to secure additional budget revenues of at least 20 billion lei in the next four years by attracting foreign investment, suppressing public procurement schemes, fighting the shadow economy, abolishing arbitrary tax benefits and introducing additional taxation on luxury and vices. This goal can be easily achieved,” Andrei Năstase said at a press conference. The politician noted that this February the party introduced a legislative initiative with a proposed formula “to increase pensions below the subsistence minimum substantially and consistently (not at the expense of one-time payouts)”. Back then, he directly suggested indexing pensions with regard to the inflation rate for the previous year. “As a result, all pensions were to be indexed by 7.5% from April 1, 2020, and pensions below the subsistence level for almost 440 thousand pensioners were to be indexed by half from October 1, 2020, that is, by 15%. Our goal was to increase pensions of the most vulnerable age group of people. We indicated the profit of the National Bank of Moldova paid to the state budget as an additional source to finance expenses according to the indexation formula proposed by the DA Platform,” Andrei Nastase said. “Unfortunately, at that time our proposal was not supported by the parliamentary majority due to the budget austerity. Today we are all witnessing humiliation of the aged people who are promised a one-percent increase,” the politician said. The Dignity and Truth Platform Party asks the government to urgently pay a one thousand lei allowance to all pensioners.