How many companies were shut down by the crisis and what economic sectors they were operating in?

More than one third of the companies which entered liquidation or those that temporarily suspended their operations over the last two years did not do any business in 2008 or didn"t even meet their legal requirements of filing their balance sheets.

This is the conclusion of an internal study made by the Ministry of Finance on a sample of over 170,000 companies, out of the 304,000 companies which suspended their operations or entered liquidation.

The study of the Ministry reviewed the period between May 2008, that is four months before the outbreak of the global crisis, and the end of Q1 2010.

That is enough to allow an evaluation of the effect the lump sum tax had on small companies (ed. note: - the implementation norms for the lump sum tax were adopted in April 2009 and the measure was severely criticized by the Romanian business environment).

The conclusion of the study by the Ministry is that, given the available data and the practical expertise it has acquired, the main reasons which led to the striking off of those companies are the following: giving up on businesses which became essentially unsustainable after the introduction of the lump sum tax, the shrinking turnover due to the economic crisis, as well as the transfer of the operations to other companies or types of organizations, in particular Authorized Persons (PFA).

Just 2,355 companies (1.36%) of the ones that were stricken off last year had been incorporated in 2009, and 78% of them had been incorporated before 2007.

The study of the Ministry of Finance does not however present a detailed situation for each economic sector in which companies suspended their operations or entered liquidation.