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Court of Auditors head: Grim years ahead, too much stealing in Romania
The next couple of years will be some of the grimmest for Romania for a lot of reasons, and at the same there is too much stealing in our country, Court of Auditors' president Nicolae Vacaroiu said on Tuesday at the meeting of the Bucharest Club.
Vacaroiu said that the Court of Auditors, which succeeds in annually directing to the budget about 700 million euros, needs to be completely autonomous.
He also mentioned that 60 percent of the newly built houses and villas are not taxed for various reasons - the situation of the land is often unclear, or no legal building permit has been issued.
In this context, Vacaroiu (a former PM between 1992 - 1996) pleaded for the identification of institutional mechanisms to return stolen money and proceeds from ill-gotten resources to the society.
He cautioned that the years 2013 - 2014 are 'knocking on the door' and opined that ‘these will be the grimmest for Romania for many reasons. 'We are now under a fiscal governance ... with the budget deficit capped somewhere at 1.98 actual deficit, which means, leaving the external debt aside - 'income' equal 'expenses' (...). The economic growth can lead somewhere to 1.5%, taking into account the low base we are starting from,' said the former Prime Minister.
The president of the Court of Auditors also drew attention that Romania has a 'big handicap' - the destroyed agriculture. 'An agriculture completely and deliberately destroyed from outside, with robotically applied advice have got us here. Agriculture does not recover overnight. In the first place we no longer have human resources, the population working in the rural environment is aged around 70 on average, not to mention the irrigation systems,' said Vacaroiu. He reminded that his government invested in irrigation systems and restored the one in the Covurlui Plain, of which nothing has been left since. 'Everything was pilfered away since 1996,' added the former Prime Minister.
He also dwelt on the fact that in the past Romania's five crude plants were dealing both with refinery and with the petrochemical industry. 'Today no plant is working in petrochemistry any more, we managed the 'performance' to sell them off. (...) And now we complain that Romania is out of resources,' said Vacaroiu.
According to him, one of the toughest problems to solve, which is even a 'hot potato,' is the immense amount of 15 billion euros resulting from final judgments awarding compensations in cash to former landlords and which has to be paid.
The former PM also wonders what will happen in 2013 and 2014, given that no more foreign loans can be taken out because the deficit would be exceeded.
Not in the last place, the president of the Court of Auditors warned of the annual losses of 7 billion euros in illegal VAT refunds for fake invoices, ghost companies and similar scheming, and noted that the share of Romania's underground economy is twice as high as that in the EU.