MP on Ossipenko case: Exhausting to separate small city enterprise and politics | Information

Repinski, a former mayor of close by Jõhvi, Ida-Viru County and previously in workplace with the present Kohtla-Järve Mayor, Nikolai Ossipenko, stated Wednesday that: “Each respectable entrepreneur may acquire energy within the native authorities if she or he needed to. Nikolai Ossipenko’s firms, as issues stood once I was conversant in the figures, employed about 600 folks. That pulls various weight, should you rely them as votes.”

Kohtla-Järve has a inhabitants of just a little over 33,000.

“It’s well-known that firm workers typically vote for his or her supervisor or firm proprietor when he’s a candidate and when he participates in politics,” Repinski, no stranger to controversy himself, most lately after working as a Bolt taxi driver alongside his common day job on the Riigikogu, continued.

“I feel that each entrepreneur or firm proprietor or supervisor of this type, in the event that they needed to do one thing referring to the native authorities, may achieve this, after which they’d acquire the identical degree of affect, if no more,” Repinski continued.

This meant there was nothing unusual about Ossipenko-owned firms successful procurements from native authorities; since Ossipenko’s firms have been situated in Jõhvi, adjoining to Kohtla-Järve, this additionally meant his costs might be decrease than his rivals’, Repinski stated.

Ossipenko himself is the kind of one that may be very lively, which is each a blessing and a curse, Repinski went on, in that maintaining enterprise and politics discrete issues is troublesome.

Nonetheless, the enterprise aspect would possibly in some methods have been simpler if his good friend had not gotten concerned in politics additionally, the Heart MP concluded.

“I feel sure, it is actually a really troublesome problem that finally results in instances like what occurred yesterday.”

A complete of round a ten persons are underneath investigation, together with Ossipenko, following a Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) swoop on Tuesday.

Ossipenko himself doesn’t maintain political workplace at this juncture, although several of those detained for questioning Tuesday – lots of whom will have already got been launched – do, and embody the town council chair and vice chair, and two deputy mayors.

The suspicions primarily relate to the providing and taking of bribes, and of affect peddling.

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