Andrei Sosa, owner of the Expirat Club in Bucharest, announces he will close business following the Friday night deadly fire in the Colectiv Club.
In a Facebook post, Sosa admitted on Monday he has endangered the life of thousands of clients since 2003, “every weekend and sometimes during weekdays, too.”
“Perhaps to buy a G-Klasse [Mercedes], because I wasn’t smart enough for anything else… I have graduated from a technical faculty, I could have been a valuable engineer for my country… I got stranded in this barkeep ‘job’. I have assumed the detailed knowledge of all laws. Even if I should have seen, owing to my qualifications, how many amps there were in the fuse panel and whether a cable might catch fire. I failed to do that right, too. I had enough electrical ‘malfunctions’ over these 14 years,” he wrote.
Sosa mentioned the lack of strict verifications in Bucharest’s clubs and bars. “I am a friend of one of Colectiv’s owners. I know he will serve many years in prison. They should have taken me, too. Even if, until the present experience, I think I did almost everything I thought fit. In a different context, I have drawn up a balance of taxes I paid to the Romanian state over the past five years only — 2,700,000 lei. (…) You know how a licence is obtained at the Municipality? You submit a pile of documents in January, which you have anyway — single registration number, lease contract, garbage and pest control [contracts], a tax, etc. Believe me, a secondary school graduate is able to analyse and issue an authorization in 20 minutes based on the necessary documents. A 20-minute job in four months.” More…