At the meeting Mayor of Murmansk Sergey Subbotin held a speech where he summarized his work in the previous year. After finishing his speech, the mayor tried to leave the room, but was held back be one of the council members, and forced to listen to the debate about his work for nearly four hours, Komsomolskaya Pravda writes.
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22 of the 26 members of the council present at yesterday’s meeting called Subbotin’s work “unsatisfactory”. A Murmansk blogger calls the meeting in the city council “bedlam” and says that the city’s reputation has fallen even more because of the “parliamentary gangsterism” in the city council.
The relationship between the independent Mayor Subbotin and the United Russia dominated City Council has for some time been complicated. The conflicts cumulated in April, when Subbotin was accused by the editor of the Murmansk newspaper Vecherni Murmansk Nataliya Chervyakova for censorship and threats. Subbotin answered by accusing the editor for insults and reported her to the police.
As BarentsObserver reported, last week Subbotin dismissed Chervyakova from the post as editor for Vecherni Murmansk, a newspaper owned by the city administration. Vecherni Murmansk is one of the biggest newspapers in Murmansk Oblast.
Sergey Subbotin was elected Mayor of Murmansk in March 2009. He ran as an independent candidate and received some 60 percent of the votes, while United Russia’s candidate Mikhail Savchenko got 35 percent. Then Governor of Murmansk Oblast Yury Yevdokimov openly expressed his support to Subbotin, and was forced to leave the post less than a week later.
