PM Orban: My objective, by the end of tomorrow, is to establish the final form of ordinance on budget revision

Prime Minister Ludovic Orban on Monday stated that his objective is to establish the final form of the Government Emergency Ordinance (OUG) on the budget revision by Tuesday-end. 

"My objective is, by the end of tomorrow, to establish the final form of the Government Emergency Ordinance on budget revision. We have several objectives that we intend to achieve with the budget revision. The first one and the most important is to ensure the financial resources for public institutions and local authorities, financial resources that are indispensable for their good functioning, for the payment of salaries, of the various social securities, operating expenses such as public lightning, school heating and other categories of expenses. The second objective is to eliminate that practice of the previous government of burdening the business environment with unplanned expenses that were caused. For instance, one of our objectives that we have in mind with this budget revision is to bring the VAT reimbursement to companies up to date, for its not possible to artificially maintain a deficit and deprive the companies of their legal right to receive the money they are entitled to receive through the reimbursement of the VAT," said Orban, after he participated in an event organised by the Romanian Academy. 

He also added that there will be money granted to ensure all payments that must be done through the National Health Insurance House are made. 

"There are medical leaves that haven't been paid for 11 months. (...) Also, we must bring up to date the situation of the payment of some works on all investment projects, regardless if we are talking about governmental level or investments made under the National Local Development Plan. And we also need to eliminate all unnecessary expenses from the structure of the expenditure budget, which cannot be made and are only there without the possibility existing for them to be actually carried out by the end of 2019," explained the PM. 

Ludovic Orban stated that the amounts representing the transfer of the pension fund from the state budget will have to be increased in order to ensure the payment of these rights, "in the context in which the former government did not care to earmark enough money to the state budget, so that this transfers to the pension budget." "And we will also need to supplement the amount from the state budget to the pension budget," added Orban. 

Asked if the Government will decrease the funds granted to Education and Transport, he said these were only rumors, "these were only rumors spread by people with bad intentions, most probably from the PSD area without any relation to the reality." 

"We will grant financial resources to co-finance any programme that will bring benefits to the Romanians. (...) The form of the Government Emergency draft will be made public and we will adopt it by the end of this week," said Orban.