Fmr PM Ciolos: Piggy bank of national budget is empty, European funds do not come for propaganda

Former Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said on Wednesday evening that "the piggy bank of the national budget is empty" and the European funds "do not come for the sake of propaganda or lies." 

"The third PSD/ALDE [Social Democratic Party, major at rule, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, ALDE, ed.n.]government for more than 16 months has been justifying its inability to absorb European funds for the same reason - the technocrat government. The scandal and the empty words solve nothing and cannot endlessly hide the problems of the government's obvious incompetence. The piggy bank of the national budget is empty, and European funds do not come for the sake of propaganda or lies," Ciolos wrote on Facebook. 

At the same time, he distributed a 100 Romania Platform release saying that Romania risks losing 1.6 billion euro for good from the financial allocation for 2014-2020. 

"This amount will be added to the over 1.2 billion euro lost by Romania last year from the allocation for the period 2007 - 2013. The equivalent of the cost of 14 modern hospitals, with over 800 beds each, or the cost of building the Bucharest-Iasi motorway," reads the release. 

"European Funds Minister Rovana Plumb said yesterday that Romania allegedly has an absorption rate of 16pct, given that the EU average is 18pct. Although we are at the middle of the fifth year of the current programming period, Romania has absorbed about 13pct of its financial allocation (+ 4pct pre-financing automatically paid). If we exclude the funds allocated to the National Rural Development Program through the Common Agricultural Policy, the real absorption decreases to 5.6pct, one of the lowest in Europe. Of course, Mrs Plumb puts the blame on the difficult inheritance. Since 2012, PSD / ALDE has had total control over the government and Parliament, except for the year of the technocratic government, when the absorption was the highest. Since then, three governments have passed," the statement said. 

According to Romania 100 Platform, "the situation is so bad" that the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, "was obliged to send an official letter to her party colleagues, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila and ministers Lucian Sova and Rovana Plumb, whereby she declares herself "extremely concerned about the planning and implementation of the transport infrastructure projects co-financed by the Cohesion Fund and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)." 

"The incompetence of the PSD-ALDE government, combined with the very low credibility that the current parliamentary majority has in Brussels, increases the risk for Romania to lose large sums of money, including for the next financial period 2021-2027," the release also says.