Gheorghe Piperea: "The Sovereign Investment Fund should be subordinate to the Parliament"

The future Sovereign Investment Fund, provided for by the Simion Plan and the AUR program, should be subordinated to the Parliament, lawyer Gheorghe Piperea, MEP from our country, told us.

"I believe that such a financial vehicle should be a large holding company, which is under the direct authority of the Parliament", Gheorghe Piperea told us.

The European deputy continued: "The Sovereign Investment Fund is absolutely necessary because any independent nation that wants to preserve its strategic resources and be on its own feet from a financial point of view creates such a fund. Obviously the world immediately thinks of Norway, which is not a member state of the European Union, just as it is not Saudi Arabia which has such a fund, but there is a much better model, much closer to us, of the Poles . In practice, we are talking about ensuring Romania's strategic independence on the resource side and on the capital side, and this can only be done through a sovereign fund that leaves with such an important asset capital, that when it has to protect large strategic investments such as gas reserves in our country to be able to do this without resorting to all kinds of negotiations and all kinds of compromises from an economic and geostrategic point of view. The same with oil, and with digitalization, as well as with the Green Deal issue. Especially since the implementation of the Green Deal until 2050 requires investments of over 1.9 trillion euros from our country alone".

Mr. Piperea mentioned that the respective fund will also be present on the financial market "both to grant capital to Romanian companies and to grant guarantees to companies from our country for business expansion", but he wanted to show that the most important thing is that through this fund "the state's holdings in important companies in the field of energy, in the production of cars, even in banks will be preserved, so as to ensure the financial independence of Romania".

The European deputy, who also represents the AUR in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, said: "There are many reasons why this sovereign fund is necessary and not only because this idea was circulated at a given time by some like Liviu Dragnea or Marcel Ciolacu. The fund will have an initial starting social capital that will be from government funds, after which it will be able to be capitalized by joining some participations of the Romanian state in the portfolio of this sovereign fund". Gheorghe Piperea also said that this sovereign fund should, additionally, ensure where it is absolutely necessary the strategic management of companies.

"Unfortunately, Romania has almost completely withdrawn from strategic companies on the management side and has retained some importance in certain boards of directors, but not on such management, but only as a non-executive member of such structures", concluded Mr. Piperea.