The government may get up EUR1 billion from privatizations and stock exchange listing of state-owned companies this year; however, unless this money is put in a separate account and spent only on infrastructure works or projects that contribute to a reboot of the economy, the privatizations will all have been in vain.
The Romanian govenrment collected billions of euros from the major privatizations like they BCR, Petrom or Romtelecom. It gained nothing, though, because the money was used for governmental spending, for pensions, wages or electoral expenses, which did not result in any school, business center or highway.
Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, appointed to this position two months ago, is now saying he wants to create a national development fund using the Norwegian model, in which to put the money collected from privatizations, royalties or floatation of state-owned companies, which may not be used discretionarily.
Norwegian model or not, the money must no longer go to wages and pensions and under no circumstances should it be used to finance the budget deficit, experts and businesspeople say. It has to be used to create either an intervention or economic reboot fund or an investment fund, but whatever the name, it must no longer be managed solely by the government or be available to the political decision-makers. The money has to be used to for development and investments, for projects that create added value.
The projects that could be financed using such a fund, says Ionel Blanculescu, fiscal expert and secretary of the board of business sector experts that will serve as advisors to the prime minister, include reactors 3 and 4 of the Cernavoda nuclear power plant (SE Romania) and the Tarnita-Lapusesti hydropower plant (NW Romania), “a project that will become very profitable if it gets funding.”
“The money has to be invested in projects that generate added value for the economy, that drive the GDP up, to prevent the Nokia investment situation from happening again,” says Cristian Parvan, secretary general of the Romanian Businesspeople Association (AOAR), while Vladimir Sterescu, senior vice president consumer support and country manager of call-center service provider Computer Generated Solutions (CGS) says that he would invest in the Romanian education system, the quality of which has been dwindling in recent years.
The government got EUR200.8 million from the auction sale of the country’s largest copper mining company, Cupru Min, and more than EUR37 million from the listing of 15% in Transelectrica in the past month.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)