Financial Press Review, 23 February

The Curierul Naţional opens today’s issue with an article entitled ‘Operation “Money for young entrepreneurs”‘. The appetite of young people to start a business is growing, and the proof stands in the large number of companies registered at the Trade Register Office within the supporting programme for business debutants’.

‘The rush to establish firms’ noted the Ziarul Financiar, under the headline ‘Who are the first youngsters to receive 10,000 euros from the state to establish a business?’

‘Starting to support young entrepreneurs’, writes the Bursa in an article on the same topic. The Ziarul Financiar published an article entitled ‘Traian Băsescu discovers corruption in the Interior Ministry: Wherever you put your finger, corruption seeps through.’

‘The President is now discovering the embarrassing state of the most bureaucratic Government institution - the Interior Ministry’, writes the aforementioned daily, and continues: ‘the Ministry of Administration and Interior has been at the centre of scandals for many years, whether they entailed issuing driver’s licences, illegal employment or fight over control of the secret service of the Interior Ministry, the eyes and ears of every interior minister.’

‘The scandal involving corrupt customs officers is but the last episode in a long series of illegalities found within the ministry.’ ‘Minister’ Igaş admits that the citizen’s confidence in the structures of MIA is at its lowest rate in history, given that in order to perform its tasks, employees still need people’s support’, we read in the article.

‘How is it possible that 14 percent of border officers are under arrest, and their heads are still in office?’, the Ziarul Financiar drops the question. Heads of the Border Police (...) did not utter a word at this time, nor did they provide any explanation. While silence fell over the Ministry of Interior, the exoneration began at the NAFA.

The Ziarul Financiar reproduced the president’s call to ‘spray the organized crime groups both at county and national level, if any’ arguing: ‘Isn’t it a bit late for such a call coming from a president who has been at the forefront state for seven years?’

The Curierul Naţional publishes an article under the headline ‘Anti-corruption General Directorate (DGA) has discovered hot water, meaning corruption. So far, only in customs.’ ‘What almost everyone have already been knowing, authorities have just now discovered’, we read in the article. ‘Everyone knows that being a custom officer or a border policeman (...) is a very lucrative job. Basically, the collective perception of the word “customs” is associated with a villa of a questionable taste, seasoned with at least two limousines.’

‘However, now everyone talks about customs and border. (...) Nobody ever thinks about the welfare sometimes unmasked of the Road Police employees or of the Economic and Financial Commissioners.’(...) Should we wonder why the heads of the Police Academy graduating class and those blowing in their neck choose the Road or Economic Department?’

No matter how many agents would be arrested by the DGA, the job can not be radically changed within the MIA if some measures against their leaders are not adopted (...) This means that it is useless to sacrifice the agents if the leadership positions are given to Mararu’ brothers. (...) This means that is useless to get the small ones out of system without eliminating those who designed and protected from their armchairs the pyramidal system of bribe and lobbyism’, the Curierul Naţional concluded.

‘Those who think that we are out of recession are wrong’, the Ziarul Fianciar writes in an article. ‘A barrel of oil reached $ 106 yesterday, a record of the last two years. But the market experts fear that the record oil reached in 2008, of 147 dollars, can now be overcome and this could trigger a new wave of recession.’

The same newspaper publishes an article entitled ‘Smoking related diseases cost Romania more than 700 million euros annually’, in which the initiative of a deputy from Constanta to ‘prohibit smoking in indoor common spaces’ is being discussed.

The initiative ‘brought into discussion the Romanian legislation, one of the most permissive in Europe, and the amounts spent on treating smoking-related diseases that exceed 700 million euros’, the Ziarul Financiar writes.

‘In Romania, 89 people die every day from smoking, the equivalent of four people per hour. In the case of a non-smoker, passive smoking increases the risk of heart disease by 25 percent and 20-30 percent of lung cancer’, says the aforementioned daily quoting the explanatory memorandum of this legislative initiative.

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