National Press Review, 10 January

From today’s newspapers we find out how much and to what purposes the public institutions wasted their resources in 2010 while the population was facing severe neediness.
We also find out that the budget staff can no longer challenge in court the salary cuts and what other details were revealed in the Romgaz situation.

The România Liberă writes “600 million euros, the great public waste of 2010”.

2010 was the year when measures of painful austerity were taken: the VAT increased by 5 percent, massive discharges of employees and salary cuts took place in the budget system. What were the public institutions doing in the meantime?

The recently published audit of the Court of Auditors has showed that the institutions were spending the money on purchases without any auctions taking place, also on fictitious services and disadvantageous contracts, to which losses coming from the bad management of projects are added, as well as those generated by financial errors.

The audit has also showed that only 4 percent of the state’s institutions respect the financial legislation.

The Evenimentul Zilei writes “The CEDO effect: the budget staff can no longer dispute the 25 percent cuts applied to salaries”.

The judges in Strasbourg have decided that the state can decrease salaries when required by the public interest.

The Decision, which must be respected by all Romanian courts, has been issued in relevance to a claim brought to court by two employees of the public sector, which lost the case in Romania.
So far, throughout the country, the claims filed by the budget staff have been settled in different ways: some courts decided in their favor, some against them.

Also in today’s newspapers: the Romgaz issue.

The Jurnalul Naţional writes, taking judicial sources into consideration, that the important producer of natural gas has illegally phased the historic debts accumulated by InterAgro, so that they do not be considered debts- which might have resulted in the cessation of supply to the chemical plants.

In the România Liberă we discover “How Niculae (the owner of InterAgro) changes the uncooperative clerks in Romgaz”.

He placed reliable staff at the head of the company using the idea of dismissal or union protests as a threat, the journalists write.

On the first page of the Adevărul: “Emergency System under privatization: fears and effects”- the first real controversy related to the future Health Law.
According to the project, besides SMURD and the state ambulance system, emergencies might be placed in the task of private companies as well, also paid from public funds.

So the public funds might be shared by the state and the private system. The founder of SMURD, Raed Arafat, claims that the battle for money will undermine the mission to save lives.

From the Adevărul we also find out that “The prices of houses drops by 10% in 2012”- as estimated by the analysts. The prices today are already reduced by half compared to the period between 2006 and 2008, and the decline will mildly continue if nothing bad happens at world level to suffocate credits.

Nowadays, the real estate sector is surviving because of the First Home Programme, otherwise the financing needed for purchasing a place to live is incredibly difficult to obtain.

Translated by: Bianca Toader
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University