Moldovan institute of marketing and polls accuses "blackmail and threats" made by NGOs' representatives

Chisinau, 16 December /MOLDPRES/ - The IMAS company of sociological investigations signals that it faces pressures and blackmail on behalf of politicians and representatives of NGOs, bothered by the findings of opinion polls.

„IMAS has periodically faced, during all these years, threats and pressures on our work. When the things exceeded certain limits, we adopted a public position on these situations. In August 2010, me and the company I lead were threatened by a high-ranking official. Both at that time and at present, I immediately signaled the things taking place,” reads a press release of the company, signed by IMAS director Doru Petruti.   

Petruti said that sometimes he worked under “a certain pressure exerted by beneficiaries of surveys or their interposed persons.” “I will give you such a negative example: not so long ago, we had to signal to a foreign donor the pressured exerted on us by an NGO from Moldova (which also had the role of beneficiary), pressures by which they tried to change the conclusions of a survey assessing the work of that NGO,” Doru Petruti said.     

According to Petruti, the subject of perceptions concerning the civil society is not new. The same indexes, as those included in the opinions polls from July and December 2017, were present in a national study from 2010 and the orderer of that poll was an NGO from Moldova. “What is curious is the fact that, at that time, nobody showed discontent with the fact that perceptions about the work of the civil society are measured. There were no such complaints during the next years too, although surveys of this kind continued. The trust in this sector of activity has been measured including by the Public Opinion Barometer for quite many years,” the communiqué also reads.   

The IMAS director demands that representatives of the civil society, without giving names, “do not hide behind guerilla actions having at their basis blackmail and threats with letters of disparagement concerning the work of the Company. The NGOs which will give up cooperating with us based on the approach of this kind are partners asked to interrupt any collaboration with us as early as now.” 

Do not longer try to censor us, as you have seen that we do not leave anywhere, despite those 17 years of activity filled with pressures, Doru Petruti said.

“Of course, we are far from generalizing these things over the entire society of Moldova. They refer to some representatives of this sector, representatives who will certainly find in this communiqué their actions undertaken this week or in the past,” the IMAS director general, Doru Petruti, added.   

(Editor A. Raileanu)