Financial Press Review, 9 May

After the IMF published the results of the first evaluation of the new arrangement, a Ziarul Financiar headline reads: ‘IMF did not agree to lower social contributions. Topic to be resumed in autumn’. ‘Health insurance contributions will not decrease this fall, the President suggested.

That is impossible’, the daily writes. Under the headline ‘Health insurance contributions must decrease by at least 2 percent’, the Bursa claims that ‘in order to be effective, the social contributions should be significantly decreased, but its impact on the budget deficit should also be taken into account. (…) A fall of only one of two percent would only bring about popularity around elections’, the daily reads.

‘It is our priority in 2011 to improve management in state-owned companies’, the Bursa and the Ziarul Financiar quote the President.

‘Băsescu: Economy barons are mostly found in state-owned companies’, the Bursa reads in an article on making these companies more efficient. ‘Among the companies that the Government is following closely and that should be optimized are the two power complexes Turceni and Rovinari, the National Hard Coal Company, which has raised the biggest amount of debt to the state and which always delays payments to health and pension funds’ the Bursa reads.

The National Hard Coal Company has over 1 billion Euros in debt, the Ziarul Financiar reads in an article entitled ‘Băsescu has discovered the barons in power companies’. ‘The losses and arrears are paid by each and every Romanian’, the daily quotes the Head of State. ‘Băsescu stated this even though the managers of state-owned companies have been named on political criteria; each new minister has changed the manager. Moreover, most of the times the new management did not even come from the power industry’, the Ziarul Financiar reveals.

Fondul Proprietatea Representatives recently said that ‘companies like Hidroelectrica, Nuclearelectrica or power complexes should have a ten to thirty percent profit margin, but because of their contracts, their high costs and their inefficient management, most of them go below one percent’, the daily notes. ‘Private management in state-owned companies has been mentioned by many politicians, but until now it has not been done’.

‘The Ministry of Economy recently said that in April it will start the procedures to privatize the management in a quarter of the 50 companies where it is a majority shareholder. The names of those companies have not yet been published’, the article ends. The same daily prints an article with the headline ‘Pessimistic forecast: processed food prices to rise by another 12 percent’. According to the National Bank Governor, ‘the trouble is that the domestic market does not meet the consumer’s demand’, the article reads.

The President of Romalimenta, Sorin Minea, believes ‘there is nothing we can do to prevent prices from rising, since part of the raw materials are bought from the EU, where prices are rising’. Under the headline ‘Food market is playing’, the Curierul Naţional quotes the president of Romalimenta: ‘Half of the food market is black and everybody knows where the evasion is. Too many governments have let the black market be just to stabilize prices, but they have risen’, Sorin Minea says.


Transslated by: Gabriela Lungu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University