Financial Press Review, 18 May

The Ziarul Financiar published an article about the stages of budget status according to Mihai Tanasescu, ‘again cited as a possible prime minister again’.Romania’s representative to the IMF considered that ‘the government was rash to announce the perspective of reducing the social security contributions for the second half of 2011. The main condition for reducing rates is collecting the budget revenues. National Agency for Fiscal Administration (NAFA) is the key institution in this moment’, Mihai Tanasescu revealed.

Under the heading ‘More than half drinks sold illegall’, the Curierul Naţional writes that ‘by far one of the easiest types of tax evasion remains the one of the alcohol field’. ‘The total losses to the state budget from excise duties, VAT and other taxes on alcohol and alcoholic beverages rose to 4.5 billion euros during 2003-2010, according to the official data.’

‘The real figure is much highe’, was the estimation of one of the employers’ representatives also quoted by the daily Bursa in an article entitled ‘Black liquor market will go up to 90 percent if the excise increases.’ ‘The recent plight favored the fraudsters and the obscure companies, while the largest producers lost their profit.’ ‘Authorities do not do their job any longer, the Bursa quoted in an article the president of the Employers Organization of Alcohol and Alcoholic Beverages Industry (‘Garant’), Romulus Dascalu. ‘The gentleman suspects that there is complicity between the officials, courts and companies to cover the fraud arising from the tax evasion’, the Bursa revealed as well as the Curierul Naţional.

The Ziarul Financiar comparatively analyzed a in an article the absorption of EU funds in Romania and Bulgaria. ‘Bulgarians have less money, but they moved faster.’ (...) Romania managed to absorb up to 1 percent of the European funds available for Transports by last year’s end, meaning 47 million euros, while raising the rate in Bulgaria reached 7 percent, meaning 114 million euros.’

Under the title ‘State keeps swallowing money: debt jumped by 5 billion lei in the first quarter’, the same newspaper published an article in which we read that at the end of March, the public debt reached a new historic high, according to the ministry of Finance. ‘Analysts warned several times that the structure of Romania‘s debt has a maturity profile of adverse outcome, given the large share of short-term loans of less than a year’, the Ziarul Financiar wrote. The same newspaper published an article entitled ‘Lawyers say the largest public-private partnership (PPP), 4 billion reactors at Cernavoda, is doomed.’ ‘One of the question marks raised when it comes to framing the project in Cernavoda into the PPP law is the very definition of public partnership, in this case Nuclearelectrica,’ the Ziarul Financiar wrote.

Various dailies covered the story of the slower start of this year’s ‘Jalopy’ program. Under the heading ‘Rabla Scheme no longer saving car market,’ the Curierul Naţional revealed that the first four months of this year the new car registrations dropped by 17 percent in our country, compared to only 2.7 percent in the European Union.

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