Finacial Press Review, February 7

The Ziarul Financiar opens with an article entitled ‘Romania has spent 6.7 billion dollars with no results on the restructuring of mines’ in which we read: ‘The tragedy of Uricani, a mine owned by the National Coal Company, reveals 20 years of failing attempts to reorganize an industry that (...) produces annual losses of hundreds of millions of dollars and billion debts, but which doesn’t stop making human victims.’

In comparison, the Poles, who get over 50 percent of the necessary energy from coal, have succeeded in the past 20 years to make a success story of the mining sector, while the money amount allocated to this area rises up to 10 billion euros; among the strategies they have used are mine closures, but also privatizations.

The representatives of the Ministry of Economy of Poland said recently that coal companies are now profitable. ‘Shut down the mines, displace miners and their children will surely live better’ is the headline of an opinion article published in the same newspaper, which notes that ‘Sunday night Economy Minister Ion Ariton announced that no mine will be closed because nobody is interested in increasing the number of unemployed people’. ‘Ariton, Ialomitianu and Botis discuss about the mine restructuring’, the Bursa reads.

‘The future agreement with the IMF will support strengthening the economy’ an article is headlined in the same newspaper published on Friday after the meeting of Prime Minister Emil Boc with business representatives, to which employers have submitted 32 proposals for ‘the economy recovery measures, including reducing all charges’. In several articles the Ziarul Financiar deals with the country's cooperation with the IMF.

‘Yesterday,President Traian Basescu argued in a press statement at Cotroceni that Romania will no longer need the last tranche of the agreement with the International Monetary Fund, worth one billion euros, given the economic development and sufficient reserves of the NBR.

In another article titled ‘After two years of pause, IMF resumes pushing for privatizations’ we read that the two-year agreement with Romania which nears the end ‘recorded a total failure on the administration of 10 big state companies particularly monitored, given that their debt to the budget last year jumped by 34 percent to 6.86 billion lei’.

Among them it is included the National Coal Company, ‘one of the biggest black holes of the local economy’, as the newspaper labeled it. We note from the same article that ‘preventive type format of the future agreement, the IMF will not be able to impose certain decisions of the Government threatening to block an installment loan.

The corruption in customs forms the theme of two articles of the Ziarul Financiar. The first is entitled ‘State loses 1 billion euros per year for the customs officials accepting bribes of 40 million euros per year’. ‘The losses come from non-taxable cigarettes sold on the black market’, the newspaper explains.

‘The bribary proceeds on a 12-hour shift amounted to the Siret custom between 1 500 and 6 000 euros.’ The newspaper ‘takes into account that there are about 20 border crossings by non-EU countries like that of the Siret and the fact that the country is full of contraband cigarettes: one in three smoked cigarettes’, said the traders. ‘The simplest demonstration of the consistently collected bribes in customs is given by the wealth of the border customs officers and police chiefs’, the newspaper writes.

The Ziarul Financiar published another article entitled ‘The former arrests of other customs officers shows that the Siret operation is a simple exercise for the image’.

‘The situation was obvious and long known by the authorities’, the newspaper estimated. ‘In fact, bribery was such a common fact, that the customs declarants or customs officials did not even hide from each other (...) at least when strangers had been in their office.’

‘The arrest of customs officials in Siret, in the context of assessments for Schengen, reminisces of similar actions, which took place in 2006, at Otopeni and Ploiesti, prior to a new European Commission report, but was still not finalized legally, that is to punish the defendants in court.’

The Curierul National opens today’s issue with an article entitled ‘How some want to steal our European money?’ which supports the statement of Premier Emil Boc that ‘there are many situations in which companies owning just one handbag contract EU projects worth hundreds of millions of euros’.

Under the headline ‘Romania and the external translator lobby’, the Ziarul Financiar describes the handicap that it is discussion through a translator at an international conference with a minister in whose resume does not appear any foreign language.

The conference was held in Vienna, and the minister in question is George Ialomitianu. ‘It may even reach terrifying moments if the translator does not perceive the meanings or he lacks in finance terminology’, the newspaper concludes.

Translated by: Iulia Florescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University