The Premier stated that the Democrat-Liberals that asked him to present the budget in Parliament are irresponsible. PDL filed a simple motion on the budget yesterday.
Premier Victor Ponta stated yesterday that the reallocation of funds for the state’s continued functioning amounts to RON 1.3 bln, criticizing the PDL government for the fact that it did not earmark financial resources for the end of this year. “We found the money because we have supplementary revenues and because we are reallocating funds from somewhere else. PDL would have shut down Romania on November 1,” Ponta stated. He pointed out that the summer’s budget rectification sought to come up with the sums needed in order to return the money that the Boc Government had illegally collected from pensioners, while the Finance Ministry has now cumulated the backlog. “Now the Finance Ministry has collected all the back payments that – the Health Ministry in particular – but we’re talking about persons with disabilities, local authorities that have to pay the persons assisting people with disabilities, CNADR, where PDL kept giving contracts to itself and forgot to pay them. We are insuring the functioning of the state,” Ponta said.Also yesterday, Premier Victor Ponta labeled those that asked him to present the budget in Parliament before the elections as “irresponsible,” pointing out that the current Parliament is finishing its mandate and the MPs are in electoral campaign. “In front of which Parliament should I come with the budget? In front of the Parliament that finishes its mandate? In front of a Parliament in which most of the MPs are engaged in electoral campaign? In front of PDL MPs? I saw they were unable to come up with any idea other than how they will lower the flat tax from 16 to 12 per cent,” Ponta stated, referring to the statement that former PM Mihai Razvan Ungureanu made yesterday. Ponta stated that the reduction of the flat tax is impossible since there are no money and asked the Democrat-Liberals why they did not adopt this measure when they were in power. Premier Victor Ponta stated on Sunday that the government’s current priority is to identify the funds needed for the functioning of hospitals, for the payment of a part of the pensions and the activity of the Internal Affairs Ministry because the budget does not contain any funds for the last 45 days of the year. Later on he added that there are funds for pensions, salaries, indemnities and for the functioning of state institutions until the end of the year, the necessary funds set to be reallocated from other sources.
Boc: Postponing budget adoption, extremely detrimental and dangerous
Former Premier Emil Boc criticized yesterday the fact that the filing of the budget in Parliament was postponed. “What I consider an extremely detrimental and dangerous precedent is modifying the law so that the budget law won’t be filed in Parliament on October 10. This is profoundly abnormal. Even though the budget law was sometimes filed later than October 10, it was nevertheless filed during the autumn. To ask now for the budget law not to be filed because this is an elections year is a major error and proves that the current government does not want to show how bad the country’s 2013 budget is and what difficult measures have to be taken next year in order for Romania to be able to respect international agreements and to stay within the deficit parameters negotiated with international bodies,” Boc stated.According to the Public Finance law, the budget has to be filed by October 15.
