Financial Press Review, 24 February

Many financial newspapers cover yesterday’s declaration of the national bank governor at a UN seminar on ‘Where economic growth comes from and under what terms. ‘

‘Isărescu: Stimulating consumer spending is a bad idea’, the Ziarul Financiar headlines.

‘Isărescu: Encourage work, not consumption’, is the headline on the front page of the Curierul Naţional.

‘The Romanian people have to be let to work and stimulated to work and boost production’, the Ziarul Financiar quotes the BNR governor.

Encouraging private consumption as a way to relaunch economy is ‘a dangerous idea’, Mugur Isarescu said, ‘citing the temptation of political parties to engage in electoral charity’, the newspaper writes.

‘All those who are working in production are burdened by taxes. (...) At the same time, the BNR governor admitted that the social insurances contributions cannot be reduced unless the imbalance between taxpayers who are working, a little over 4 million people, and social assistance recipients, more than 5 million people, is fixed’, the Curierul Naţional writes.

Under the headline ‘Pessimistic signals on labour market’, the Bursa writes: ‘While Government members argued that our country would overcome the crisis this year, employers' associations warned that companies would not be hiring in the following period of time, but they would grow by increasing the competitiveness and the qualification of the existing staff.’

The Ziarul Financiar comments on the report on the consolidated general government data in 2009 issued by the Court of Auditors. ‘In 2009 the central and local administration spent 9.9 billion euros (25 percent of the general consolidated budget), breaching statutory financial provisions. Extra 173 million euros ,which is to be recovered, was spent from the budget.’

‘Even the accounting reports issued by the Ministry of Finance are inaccurate and contain erroneous data, which distort reality.’ ‘The Court of Auditors find breaches of law every year, only that according to the Court of Auditors reports there are no notable cases judicially solved’, the newspaper reveals.

‘One of the highly publicised cases concerning the Court of Auditors is that of the former mayor Adriean Videanu, to whom the auditors imputed, in 2008, 1 million illegal expenditures that the mayor had during his mandate. ‘The case was brought to court, but ‘things are sluggish. Besides, the Court of Appeal is still dealing with similar cases opened in 2006.’

Under the headline ‘Farmers call for a strategy’, the Curierul Naţional writes that ‘the approach emerged as a consequence of the fact that so far the Ministry of Agriculture has proved unable to devise a coherent strategy which would help agriculture to recover. (...) The explanation lies in the 3 million hectares of land that was not cultivated in 2010.’

‘Employers’ associations argued that out of almost 3 million hectares of agricultural land that used to be irrigated in 1989, Romania ‘succeeded’ to irrigate only 70,000 hectares last year. (...) For these reasons, Romania has become a constant and massive importer of food products, the cost prices of domestic agricultural products are higher than those of imported products, the Romanian products offer in supermarkets is increasingly low and food imports has become an unbearable burden’, the Curierul Naţional writes.

The Ziarul Financiar publishes an article entitled ‘The state promised that 2011 would be the year of the capital market and that they would privatize in a year as much as they did in the last decade.’ Three minority packages of shares in Petrom, Transgaz and Transelectrica belonging to the state will go to private investors.’ ‘The Fondul Proprietatea listing succeeded in reviving the market for a short time only, because liquidity returned to its previous levels.’

Translated by: Iulia Florescu

MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University