Financial Press Review, 4 March

The state unlocks jobs, illegal forest clearing, bribe at the customs and state-private hospitals are just some of the topics of today’s financial press.

The Ziarul Financiar opens with ‘Boagiu the new Berceanu of motorways: Cernavodă-Medgidia will not be ready in 2011’.

‘Anca Boagiu, Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, is starting to resemble her predecessor, Radu Berceanu, and other former ministries, such as Ludovic Orban or Gheorghe Dobre, more and more. All of them had two billion euros annually, but there were no motorways, only talk of them’. the daily points out.

‘Romania’s railway situation is no better as well’.

The new Bucureşti-Constanţa railway might also not be ready in July.

‘And even if it is, the road will only take 10-20 minutes less than before the work’.
The cost amounts to one billion euros.

‘The state declared the crisis ended’. the Ziarul Financiar reads.

‘The Government extended the “one job for every seven vacancies” rule from one administration to county level’.

‘This means that there are going to be more jobs filled than possible taking into account a single local council’.

Last summer the Government had decided to cut 59 000 positions in local councils.

The Ziarul Financiar wonders: ‘How did the prejudice from illegal forest clearing reach one billion euros?’.

According to official data, ‘a twenty billion cubic metres of wood has been illegally cut, amounting to one billion euros in prejudice’.
‘It may be more, considering some illegal clearings may not have been detected and the legislative vacuum from 1990-2000, when forest retrievals raised the number of owners above 800 000’.

Half of the forests are under the National Forest Administration ‘Romsilva’, and most of the smaller patches are not being administered by forest ranges, although a law from 2005 clearly stipulates they be.

The press covers the bribe at customs today as well.

‘The hearing for former Ploiesti customs manager Cornel Costea’s request to be released revealed that some of his superiors may be involved as well, assumed the NAD prosecutors’. the Curierul Naţional reads.

‘Costea refused to draw the documents until commissions had been paid’. He continued to request bribe even after the customs arrests had started, the daily mentions.
The Bursa reads that ‘ on 1st March the Constanţa Prosecutor’s Office decided against prosecuting Sorin Blejnar and others at the Ministry of Finance, in the case of authorizing fiscal storing of petroleum products’.

‘Sorin Blejnar was part of the committee that authorized the storing’.

The Curierul Naţional addresses the possibility of six state-private emergency hospitals.
‘It will be one of the biggest investments in hospital infrastructure in the past 30 years with real chances, because financing it will not involve the state budget and the management will be private’. the daily quotes Minister of Healthcare, Cseke Attilla.

‘The state will provide the land, and the private companies will finance them. The Minister claims that, although they will be erected with private money, they will be public and function based on healthcare insurance’.

Under the headline ‘Poland braces itself for a work exodus’. the Ziarul Financiar reads that ‘almost half a million Poles might emigrate in Germany and Austria to work, since on 1st May these two countries will open up their doors for ten Eastern-European countries, including Romania. (…)

‘These jobs and the two million Poles that left the country in 2004 might impact the economic growth, claims the Polish Employers’ Association, which represents 7 000 companies with three million employees’.

Translated by: Gabriela Lungu
MS Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University