Financial Pres Review, January 28

The Ziarul Financiar reads on the front page: "The "1% ministers".

This is how much of EU funds transport ministers managed to spend".

"This is the lowest percentage of EU funds attracted out of all the chapters, although this was the sector that needed investments the mosta.

There is a danger of losing the money allocated to this sector to other countries’, the newspaper points out.

When Anca Boagiu was appointed Minister of Transport for the second time, she stated that Romania "has been failing terribly in attracting European funds", but she did not point the finger at those who should have been held responsible for the disaster, the Ziarul Financiar adds.

Between 2007 and 2009, the Ministry of Transport was allocated 3.8 million euros for building motorways, but the Romanian National Company of Motorways and National Roads (RNCMNR), which should have been the sole beneficiary of these funds, trimmed 6 billion euros from the state budget.

RNCMNR would rather spend public money than European funds because this way the building projects are less supervised.

Under the front page headline "Moody’s would like more reforms,"the daily Bursa points out that "the only big international rating agency that still gives the green light for investment in Romania’ fears that "the overlap of the electoral-economic cycles might harm government discipline, since elections will be held in 2012".

"Romania’s chance to a bigger rating might increase, were the Boc Government more open to reforms and less forced by the IMF to adopt them", Moody’s believes.

"Structural reforms have to be more independent of IMF", the Curierul Naţional reads.

The aforementioned article quotes the chief of the IMF mission to Bucharest, Jeffrey Franks, who believes that "the effects coming from the VAT increase have not been significant because of the low Government administration capacity".

Under the headline "Tax Code regulations are yet to come", the Ziarul Financiar talks about the conclusion Ernst & Young presented yesterday, according to which "the regulations for applying the last year alterations to the Tax Code have not been completed yet, although the deadline will pass this week and so far the Ministry of Finance has not put forward any project for debate".

The Ziarul Financiar compares "the most important Labour Code alteration proposals" in an article entitled "Trade unions undermine proposals of foreign investors to relaunch labour market".

The topic is covered in the Curierul Naţional also, in the article "Government agrees on Labour Code improvement"

Under the headline "European Court of Justice ready to point the finger at us in pollution tax case", the Curierul Naţional publishes an article from which we learn that the Luxembourg magistrates might rule that "the tax applied to imported vehicles is discriminatory because it is higher than the tax applied to vehicles bought from Romania".

We have been suggested to "reduce pollution taxes, while taking into account the depreciation of the new vehicle’s price, the vehicle’s manufacture year, the turnover and other factors that lead to depreciation".

In an article entitled "A blot is no blot unless it be hit: confiscated cigarettes vanish from warehouses", the Curierul Naţional reads that "packs of cigarettes are being stolen from warehouses with the help of security guards and then sold again on the black market".

The Government is looking for solutions that "would shorten the legal procedures for burning these cigarettes".

The Ziarul Financiar publishes an article whose headline summarizes it perfectly: "FP continues to go down. Former owners, worried".

This is about the decrease in the FP shares price that has been registered in the last couple of days and former owners who are witnessing the decrease in the compensation value.

The Curierul Naţional reads on the front page "Why do we rely on GMO?".

"Romania plans to resume GM crops cultivation and has already submitted an approval request to the European commission", Minister of Agriculture Valeriu Tabără confirms.

Translated by: Rluca Mizdrea
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest Univesrsity