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Manfred Weber: After hearing of Commissioner-designate Minzatu, still questions related to her property needing clarification
Leader of the European People's Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament Manfred Weber said in a press release on Tuesday evening that after the hearing of Romanian Commissioner-designate Roxana Minzatu there are still questions about her property in Brasov that need clarification.
"Europe faces big challenges in the next five years: we need a strong and united Commission ready to act and deliver. Our criteria throughout the hearings was and is clear: We have to assess the candidates objectively based on their performance and also based on their ability to deliver without any obstacles related to their past or current activities," Weber is quoted as saying in the press release the EPP spokesperson sent on Tuesday.
"After today's hearing of Commissioner-designate Minzatu, there are still questions related to her property that need clarification. It is important for us to have a Commission free from any allegations and for which the integrity is not questioned at any time. We need clear political and legal certainty about that," added the leader of the EPP group in the EP, who is also the president of the pan-European formation.
During the evening, National Liberal Party MEP Siegfrid Muresan, who is EPP group vice president, sent a similar message in a briefing for the Romanian media.
"MEPs in the employment and culture committees on behalf of the EPP group told us at the end of the hearing that they have questions to clarify, including in what concerns the property of Mrs Minzatu and that tomorrow [Wednesday] we shall have more talks among the EPP group leadership and the EPP MEPs in the employment and culture committees. This is where we are at right now," Muresan said.
Asked about whether there will be additional written questions from the relevant committees for the hearing, Muresan has not ruled out this possibility.
"We have a few modalities we can act in. We can address written questions, we can invite her to a second hearing, we can give a negative vote now, we can give a positive vote with a majority of two thirds on the level of coordinators or we can cast a positive vote in the plenum of the committee in question with a simple majority," he explained.
During her hearing in Brussels on Tuesday before the European Parliament's joint committees on employment and social affairs and on culture and education, Romania's candidate to the EC's Vice-President for the People, Skills and Preparedness portfolio Roxana Minzatu had to provide explanations about the legality of the addition to her house in Brasov, on the grounds of suspicions of having intervened without an authorisation on the building that would be labelled as historical monument.
Roxana Minzatu maintained that the building is not a historical monument and that she is in possession of documents from the Culture Ministry that attest to this. "In two documents, one of 2011 and one issued yesterday [Monday] by the Culture Ministry it is mentioned that this house that I have lived all my life in is not a historical monument," Roxana Minzatu told MEPs.
After the hearings, she put at the disposal of the Romanian journalists present in Brussels photocopies of the documents she referred to during the hearing, which would confirm that the house in question is not a historical monument.