English
• Companies which had a perfect operation for 20 years are on the brink of bankruptcy, because the government hasn't reimbursed the money for the projects they conducted using European funds, according to Florin Pogonaru
• Liviu Mihaiu: "Leonard Orban is an ornamental minister, who is there only for decoration, he is just doing cameos and he has no power, an that is why we are asking for his resignation"
Companies which conduct projects funded using European grants no longer want to apply, in the next financial year, for the further absorption of EU funds, due to the problems arising in the system, and especially due to the delays in the reimbursements, Florin Pogonaru, the president of the Romanian Association of Businesspeople (AOAR) said yesterday, at a press conference.
He said: "Neither I, nor the companies which are part of the Association that conduct this kind of projects will not touch the European grants for at least one cycle, until things straighten themselves out. If I could drop the projects I have ongoing, which use structural funds, without losing money, I would abandon them immediately".
According to the coalition for NGOs for Structural Funds, "at the end of September 2012, Răzvan Cotovelea, secretary of state in the Ministry of European Affairs (MAEur), said that the Ministry of Public Finance will transfer 475 million lei for POSDRU payments (ed. note: the Sectoral Operational Program - Development of Human Resources), and in the beginning of October, only 209 million lei were delivered, less than the amount which was mentioned in the public statements, and the rest was not made available to the management authority.
Approximately 1500 requests for reimbursement were not honored. Aside from those, there are also the applications filed between September 2012 and for which the contractual payment delay has been exceeded".
The officials of the coalition claim that currently, over 3,000 organizations and companies which signed financing contracts with the management authorities are at risk of going bankrupt.
The president of the AOAR said that there are companies which for 20 years had a perfect activity, without any problems with the government, and they now have their accounts frozen and are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Florin Pogonaru said: "Under the POSCCE (ed. note: the Operational Sectoral Program - Increase of the Economic Competitiveness) 148 projects were reviewed and 68 were approved, but the latter did not get any financing either. We talked to the Prime Minister, to the minister of finance, but nothing was done. I won't trust any political statements about the European funds until I see the prime minister < faint > at his desk in trying to see why certain funds are stuck in got knows what management authority, just like it happened in Poland until things started working out. Over there, the prime minister would be holding videoconferences with the equivalent of the Romanian prefects until he would doze off, talking about the problems surrounding the European grants".
Liviu Mihaiu, the representative of the "Save the Danube and the Delta" Association, advises all of the beneficiaries and developers of such projects to sue the government.
He said that the NGOs will continue their protests, as several dozens members of such associations yesterday protested in front of the Ministry of Public Finance. The protesters handed Finance Minister Florin Georgescu a complaint and a bag of T-shirts sporting the inscription "I'm giving my shirt away".
"Leonard Orban is an ornamental minister, who is there only for decoration, he is just doing cameos and he has no power", Liviu Mihaiu said.
In this context, the NGOs yesterday asked for the resignation of Leonard Orban from the position of Minister of European Affairs. They emphasized that the only reason they were not asking for the resignation of Florin Georgescu was because he has already announced that he would no longer remain minister of Finance after the elections.
The officials of the NGOs which attended the press conference said that there are requests for reimbursement which are more than 400 days overdue, even though the government is supposed to honor the reimbursement applications within 45 days.
"There are a number of applications we can't submit because other, older applications haven't been verified. The labor of the private sector over the last 20 years is collapsing due to the incompetence of the Romanian government", the quoted sources said.
The emergency resumption of payments for these projects and the derogation from the penalties arising from the taxes which the developers of POSDRU projects were unable to pay because the Romanian government did not reimburse them, are two of the demands of the protesters who picketed the headquarters of the Ministry of Public Finance.
NGOs and businesspeople have also asked the Minister of Finance to take responsibility for the problems which exist in the POSDRU management system, "rather than placing them on the shoulders of the beneficiaries who see themselves as unable to < < lend > > money to the government free of charge".
"After six months of delays, the developers see themselves forced to freeze the projects they have begun and to lay off their employees. This will have a negative impact not only on the implementers and on their direct beneficiaries, but also on the entire economy of the country, on the unemployment rate and on the GDP", the quoted sources say.
Some of the severe problems which the mentioned sources have singled out in the management of POSDRU include: the failure to honor the 45 day contractual deadline for the payment of the amounts owed according to the reimbursement applications, and the absence of amounts allocated from the national budget needed for maintaining a constant stream of payments to the project implementers, the lack of transparency in the allocation of the funds and the retroactive and unilateral modification of the ongoing contracts.
Euro
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Liră sterlină
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