Over 100 NGOs, trade unions and employers’ associations have warned Prime Minister Emil Boc yesterday through an open letter that Romania risks losing a significant part of the approximately EUR 30 bln in non-reimbursable funds because of the Government’s and the public authorities’ inefficiency when it comes to managing these funds. ‘There is a significant interest in giving these funds and projects to institutions which pay their share,’ Dragos Frumosu, president of the Federation of Food Industry Trade Unions (FSIA), stated for Realitatea.net.

The main problems signaled by the NGOs concern several aspects such as the lengthy time it takes to receive an answer after filing the financing request (10 months afte0r the filing of the request, in contrast to the Prime Minister’s promise one year ago to shorten that time span to 30 days) and the length of the procedures needed to contract the financing. Another problem concerns the significant delays in reimbursing the tranches of money spent by those that handle the projects. The impossibility of recovering the VAT is another problem despite the fact that recovery of the VAT is provisioned by law, that impossibility forcing those that handle projects financed from structural funds to contribute with tens or even hundreds of thousands of Euros to their budgets against the backdrop in which no bank in Romania offers credits for that. Last but not least, the letter also underlines the deficient communication between the management authorities and the intermediary bodies on one side and those that request financing from structural funds on the other side.

The signatories notify the Premier that the Government takes measures only at rhetorical level, while the management authorities that handle the operational programs face serious personnel and bureaucracy problems. The authorities responsible for managing structural funds have insufficient employees and in most cases the ones they have are inexperienced.