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Corina Cretu in regional hospital scandal: EC does not agree on European funds being spent on documentation alone
Corina Cretu, the European commissioner for regional policy, declared on Thursday that the allocation of money for building regional hospitals this year, in case the Romanian government made a request in this respect, was possible, but pointed out that at European Commission level the idea of allocating funds for documentation alone was not accepted.
“I learned from the press, from the prime minister, that the money would be used for documentation alone, the effective construction being made in the next period of time. I want to point out that officially, we at the European Commission, were not informed about this decision and we are not comfortable with the fact that the money allocated should be distributed just for documentation. We would have liked to see the effective implementation. I said publicly and say it again today to Romania authorities: it has not been a matter of money when we speak about building the three regional hospitals. We have expected this request for more than a year but it never came. Or maybe resources which cannot be spent before 2023 in other operational programs are being identified. Therefore it is at the disposal of the Romanian state to identify resources from where additional sums of money can be found for regional hospitals,” Cretu showed in a statement to the press on the occasion of the 8th Conference on the evaluation of EU cohesion policy.
Corina Cretu pointed out that the Romanian government should make an application for the projects or for the increase of the amount needed for regional hospitals.
She added that in the EC opinion at least one of the regional hospitals could have been completed “if government had had the political will to do it.”She added that she had often requested the Romanian government to send EC a point of view on the way in which it intended to continue the regional hospital project.