Financial Press Review, December 13

The lack of communication between authorities’ data bases, a new exports record, thick and unclear public acquisitions law are just some of the many topics that this week’s first financial press review covers.

The Ziarul Financiar prints and article entitled: ‘How the Government suffers from its own incompetence: the lack of clear data pushes it into taking rush decisions.’

‘The Government has modified the legislation on child allowance, but up to the last moment didn’t seem to know precisely how many families would be affected, what the cost that they were going to pay was, or what they were to receive in exchange.’

‘The fact that the unitary salary law and its grids will come into force in 2012 is (also) a consequence of the lack of real data.’

‘Nevertheless, there are institutions under government authority that have valuable data bases,’ the same daily reads. It gives examples such as the site of the Ministry of Public Finance, that of the Trade Register, the National Institute of Statistics, the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate.

‘Why aren’t these data exploited?’ the daily asks.

‘If we want this to happen, the systems have to communicate. Hence, a standard of communication is required,’ but it seems to be nonexistent.

‘That isn’t to say it couldn’t exist. But someone would have to work on it,’ the Ziarul Financiar reads.

The Bursa prints that ‘The IMF didn’t ask for a shorter maternity leave, the decision belongs to the Government, forced to drastically cut spending,’ Jeffrey Franks, the chief of the IMF mission in Romania, points out in a letter to mother associations.

‘Unfortunately these measures are inefficient – they allocate resources to privileged families, but don’t help poor families enough.’

‘Exports reached a new historic highest in October: 3.52 billion euros,’ the Ziarul Financiar reads.

Under the headline ‘More exports than before the crisis,’ the Bursa reads that ‘this will be the direction in 2011 as well, because signs in the euro zone are fairly good.’
Under these circumstances, exports will keep trumping imports,’ so ‘the commercial deficit is expected to keep falling.’

From the Curierul Naţional we find out that ‘in order to spend all the European funds, Romania would have to spend 15 million euros a day until 2015, according to a European Commission representative.

And that’s just financing from the EU budget.

If we add national and private co-financing to that, or international financing, we practically get 30 million euros a day.

Romania has a few problems, such as ‘thick and unclear public acquisitions law.’

‘The law leaves room for interpretation.’ And public acquisitions procedures are ‘unclear, ambiguous.’ The financial cycle is ‘complicated and intricate.’

The daily concludes that ‘we need clear-cut mechanisms for these European investment projects.’

‘Do you realize that it is the court that now decides who wins an auction?’ the Curierul Naţional quotes the National Confederation of Romanian Employers president.

‘A court’s role is to check for irregularities or illegalities in an auction, not to rule who wins that public auction,’ Cristian Pârvan explained.

The Ziarul Financiar analyzes buildings in Bucharest that were erected before and after the 1977 earthquake, the most destructive earthquake in the past 50 years.

‘The communist apartment buildings were built without any ‘architectural ambitions’, with modest spaces and ‘cluttered’ rooms, poor quality facilities and plumbing, that in time have become a real problem – rusted pipes, unsanitary basements – but don’t have any structural problems.’ (…)

‘The approximately 400 000 apartments built before the earthquake in Bucharest, that is over 35 years ago, can be classified as old and are a weighting factor, but, in case of an earthquake, they wouldn’t necessarily be less safe than the new ones, built by companies and construction workers to whom the devastating image of 1977 is not that fresh.’

Translated by Gabriela Lungu and Raluca Mizdrea
MA Students, MTTLC, Bucharest University