Financial Press Review, February 4

The Ziarul Financiar presents the conclusion of a seminar on fiscality held yesterday: ‘VAT and sole taxation quota kept in place in 2011’.

The Curierul Naţional dedicates the opening article to this subject: ‘The consequences of a VAT reduction’.

‘At the moment a VAT reduction would not be beneficial, since it would not lead to lower prices,’ the daily quotes Dan Lazăr, State Secretary at the Ministry of Finance.

‘He also mentioned a few other intentions to simplify fiscal forms, such as reducing the number of parafiscal taxes to under one hundred until the end of the Government’s term,’ over 263 at the moment, and limiting the number of documents filed in by small companies and their frequency, the Ziarul Financiar reads.

The Bursa also addresses this topic in an article entitled ‘Finance announces less parafiscality’.

The Ziarul Financiar prints an article which reads: ‘budget debt of the top ten state companies with losses monitored by the IMF has increased by 34 percent, amounting to 1.5 billion euros,’ last year. The National Hard Coal Company is still the biggest deadbeat, its debt has tripled in 2010.

The Ziarul Financiar opens with an article entitled ‘Bankers fighting over a new “credit with zero interest” recipe: installments on a credit card’. Bankers consider that the Turkish no interest installments for shopping paid with your credit card recipe is the ‘key’ to unlocking credit.

The idea of installments without interest was taken by top banks from smalltime banks. (…) This year even taxes or insurance policies can be paid in installments, while in the beginning this was only possible for appliances and clothes.’

The daily Bursa opens with an article entitled ‘A first at the customs’. ‘Yesterday’s show was a first: since a mill was going down on Siret, taking a customs office and moving it in Bucharest with everything in it, including the janitor (she is said to have had her share) is unheard of. What do you think determined the arrest of a Moldovan customs office on February 3, 2011? Schengen or the Democrat Liberal Party (PDL) elections on May 15?’

‘Yes, the corruption problems are real, but the European pressure that there is too much corruption is real as well, just like the tensions between the groups in the PDL, about which Valeriu Stoica recently stated that are going to intensify as elections draw near,’ the Bursa reads.

Under the headline ‘Illegal buildings to be demolished, “becoming legal” is no longer an option,’ the Ziarul Financiar presents the main amendments to the urbanism law.

‘The Government decided through an emergency ordinance to rule out the possibility of constructors and developers that didn’t respect urban designs to become legal.’

‘Getting an urban design to become legal has become common practice,’ the daily points out. The same daily reads under the headline ‘NBR at its sixth useless meeting’ that ‘considering the price rise of raw materials on the international market, the National Bank of Romania has decided to “keep prudent” and no change anything.’

Noticing the NBR’s caution, the daily Bursa quotes the opinion of Melania Hăncilă, chief analysts at Volksbank Romania, that ‘it’s high time the Central Bank took measures to boost credit and it should start by reducing the key rate and the interest ecart for facilities given to banks, which can currently borrow at 10.25 percent for a day from the NBR.’

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