“At the moment there is no public multiannual planning of resources that the state will allocate for co-financing. If it exists, it either is not being observed or it is not realistic. Such planning could be introduced in the new agreement with the IMF especially since a significant budget effort will follow if we want to absorb another EUR15 billion of the allocation available until 2015.”
According to Radu, the Ministry of European Affairs has not managed to push things forward because it doesn’t have authority over the institutions in charge of managing the funds.
A ministry dedicated to the absorption of EU funds cannot radically improve Romania’s performance as long as the management authorities are not subordinated to the ministry and in the absence of a flexible prioritization of projects that get co-financing from the budget, Radu says. “For a radical improvement [the ministry] should have power over the management authorities and sanction them,” Radu says.
He thinks the authorities should work on a priority basis and adjust to the circumstances: “We have some programs with the EU that are blocked, but the state could pump money into those not blocked in order to increase the absorption rate. They should say: over the next three months we will make money available only for payments for major transportation projects in order to get them started. But unfortunately we don’t see such an approach.”
On the other hand, the UniCredit representative says Romania’s poor performance is not entirely due to local incompetence, but also to the complexity of EU programs and the amount of red tape in Brussels.
UniCredit is among the banks in favor of outsourcing the process of receiving applications for EU funds, administrative checks and checking technical and economic parameters.
“The final go ahead would remain in the hands of the management authority, but the consortium of banks and consultants hired would ensure better territorial coverage. As they are located closer to the applicants, this would shorten the evaluation process. They would also be responsible for poor checks of the applications and for wrongly rating projects as eligible.”
He says the lateness in ruling on whether a project is eligible or not remains a big problem. “Everything that exceeds 6 months is too much. If an applicant gets their answer after two years, competition would already have gotten a head start or the timing would no longer be right for the project. I have seen such situations for renewable energy investment projects.”
(English version by Daniela Stoican)