FROZEN ACCOUNTS The AVAS request the postponing of the payments to the victims of the FNI scam

• Postponing the payment would temporarily rescue the revenues of the AVAS, but would cost the state more

The Authority for State Assets Recovery (AVAS) is looking to postpone by three years the payment of the money owed to former FNI (National Investment Fund) clients, Aurelian Popa, the chairman of the AVAS said for BURSA yesterday. The Authority is required by law to compensate the deponents of the FNI as soon as it gets any money in its accounts, a situation which has been keeping the institution in a stranglehold for years.

If approved, the postponing of the payment to the victims of the FNI fraud could temporarily save the revenues of the AVAS, but once the delay were to expire, the state would be forced to pay more to than if the current payment schedule were programmed. This is one of the reasons that the officials have previously refused to validate similar proposals to delay the payment of the damages.

"The proposal that M. Popa is making is harmful. In the case of former FNI depositors, the court ruling states that the amounts outstanding will be adjusted by the inflation index notified by the National Statistics Institute, starting with May 20, 2000 until today. If the payment of the outstanding amounts gets postponed by three years, this simply means that the amount will increase even much more because the inflation will need to be included into the final amount", said for BURSA, Mircea Ursache, the former chairman of the Authority for State Assets Recovery.

Mircea Ursache tried to solve the issue of the payment to the former FNI victims by borrowing approximately 50 million Euros from the State Treasury, a plan which eventually fell through.

"I have made a request for a loan from the State Treasury meaning that would have allowed the AVAS to pay all of the outstanding debt to those who lost their money with the FNI, to prevent the debt from swelling with inflation, and then pay back the loan using the earnings of the AVAS. Unfortunately, the loan was not approved", Mircea Ursache added.

According to its officials, the Authority For State Assets Recovery (AVAS) has so far paid out 390 million lei to the victims of the FNI, according to the officials of the Authority.

Out of this amount, nearly 70 million lei were paid in 2010.

• The head of the AVAS: "The accounts of the institution were frozen most of the time"

Aurelian Popa, the chairman of the AVAS, explained, for BURSA, the reasons that caused the Authority to give increasing thought to the idea of postponing the payments to the victims of the FNI scam for a while: "This year, one of the serious issues that the AVAS was faced with was the fact that most of the time, its accounts were frozen, which heavily obstructed its operations. Under these circumstances, the payments that the Authority was supposed to make to allow it to function optimally were late, after its accounts would be unfrozen. Apart from the occurrence of major payment delays and the disruption of the institution"s activity, the purpose of which is to bring higher revenues to the state budget. As a result we have requested points of view from the ministries involved, concerning the passing of a bill that would allow postponing the payments to the victims of the FNI for a fixed term. Our actions will depend on the answers we will receive.

We are looking to gather support for the passing of a law concerning this issue, because if can"t perform our day-to-day operations, we won"t implicitly be able to get the money needed for the payment of those damages".