National Press Review, February 11

The wave of arrests at customs keeps on being the main topic advertised by the dailies, in Bucharest.

‘Lets find out how much Romania lost from smuggling cigarettes’. The România Liberă figured out that, at least, one truck with smuggled cigarettes got inside the country every day and that there was captured only one per week. For the last three years, Romania has lost among five hundred and one billion euro out of the aggregate budget.

The Evenimentul Zilei turns Stamora Moraviţa into ‘Camorra’ Moraviţa: one hundred thousand euro per shift reveals the bribes daily list from the border with Serbia. Moreover, it was required one euro per carton and fifty euro per a dozen of cartons. The Evenimentul Zilei outlines the opinion of a former senator about his son, a customs officer at Moraviţa: ‘he was a fool and bit the bait’.

The Gândul made another counting: ‘half of the customs officers and cops have an Audi car’. The same daily tries to find out how could banks grant credits of tens thousands euro to the customs employees who had low salaries.

Finally, the Adevărul observes that the system of recruiting customs officers is full of breaches that ease the nepotism and the framing ‘dues’. There are not required specific degrees, jobs advertisings have been published in the last instance and the selection of files was made on some unknown criteria.

Other topics revealed by the daily press. We keep on with the Adevărul: ‘Union barons, reveal your fortune!’. The statements displayed by the National Integrity Agency confirm that the headquarters leaders are the richest union traders.

Monthly, they receive from unions about twenty thousand lei salaries, as the Adevărul elaborates, they have well paid jobs in different companies and moreover, government gives them indemnities for having attended different Boards of Directors.

The Jurnalul Naţional headlines: ‘The way Romanians changed in twenty years’. The daily answers wisely by wordplay: from communist to communist. It seems that after twenty years of groping and looking for answers, Romanians have understood what happened to their lives. Their life goes very well as long as they have stores from where to buy what they want, how much they want and when they want.

The România Liberă while celebrating ‘the European anniversary of the single emergency number, 112’, a phone number that should rescue lives if it were not hold by jesters, observed that 112 jokers are not afraid of anything. Thousand of false phone calls hold the line and waste operators’ time as long as it is free.

Actually, three quarters of the phone calls sound like that: ‘send an ambulance, I have an emergency, I have broken a nail’ or ‘I called for an ambulance an hour ago because I saw a bug in the bathroom. Why didn’t it come until now?’…

Translated by: Cristina Anamaria Maricescu
MA Student, Bucharest University