Financial Press Review, 16 March

The Ziarul Financiar opens with the headline ‘Japan's nuclear crisis contaminated financial markets around the world. ‘

‘Romania’s nuclear plans will remain standing even after disaster in Japan, is called a two-page article of the same newspaper.

‘But the safety standards might be stricter, as it occurs throughout the world.

‘In our country, the state planned that by 2035 40 percent of electricity is to be generated in nuclear plants, compared to the current approximately 20 percent.

‘We shall build two reactors at the Cernavoda and a new plant.’

After Ruxandra Brutaru and Liviu Costache have quit managing Tarom and respectively the National Roads Company, the latter ‘after only half a year’, the Ziarul Financiar published an article entitled ‘Heads of state firms secretly appointed cause losses.’

The author criticized ‘the faulty method of awarding the highest level positions in state companies without a public contest for the vacancies. (...) The political criteria on which people with no experience are made business managers, costs the state of hundreds of million euros annually.’

The Revista 22 was in charge of the ‘fuel price’, ‘an unstoppable tsunami that has befallen our economy’, as the author Dan Suciu described it.

‘The fact that we are at a record price, although we are not even at a record of the quotation, it also comes from the fact that we have the largest excise duties in Romanian’s oil history.’

‘The Ministry of Finance - the fourth player of this mechanism who increased the price of gasoline - rubs his hands with joy when charging the excise duties, since the 1st of March he even removed a reduced rate facility of the biofuels by adding 8 bani to the already increasing price, ‘noted the author. In a market that is not competitive as the Romanian one, ‘the concern related to the gasoline prices will only be a populist slogan’, considered the author.

The Curierul Naţional published an article suggestively entitled ‘Agriculture, a survival practice.’

‘The Romanian farmers struggle with an intricate legislation, insufficient grants, which are received much too late. In addition, the agricultural areas are broken, and those who do not cultivate their land could be fined’, the newspaper wrote.

Under the headine ‘Rural areas keep up with city only by Tv and mobile phones’ Ziarul Financiar commented on a ‘market study conducted by Gallup in 2010 (which) showed the gap between urban and rural: 78 percent of the country families have no access to the internet, while 47 percent of them don’t even have a telephone.’

‘The approximately 3.5 million households in Romania are located in rural areas have to fill a huge gap compared to the urban areas regarding the use of internet and telephone services.’


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