The budget cannot afford more extravagances

The unprecedented and senseless aggression against the Romanian taxpayer must end! The latest days have brought new attacks against public money, pillaged by reckless people who don’t care that they are tightening the loop around an economy which has been drifting for so many years exactly because public money was lost in all this mockery.

Almost unsuspected, the aggression comes not from some foreign occupation or the country’s involvement in a war, but from the people responsible with Romania’s destiny, who form the political class. Its representatives ram their bulldozers into public money for party, group or personal interests, or give a hand to their economic clientele, which obviously doesn’t keep them on payroll out of a kind heart. The same representatives of the political class, regardless of the declared left-wing or right-wing position, are accepting, for political or electoral reasons, that public money should be wasted for purposes and goals other than it should be.

This is how the Romanian budget came to pay for things that don’t fall under its attributions, such as keeping loss-making enterprises afloat, covering theft from banks (pompously called “restructuring of the banking system” and even rated as a success), survival of the pensions system, cast into bankruptcy by the reckless policy of sending people to retirement instead of unemployment. Not surprisingly, under these circumstances, the budget can no longer honour its functions – education, health, culture, national defence, public order.

In an absolutely dramatic fashion, Justice became involved in embezzling public money from its natural destination. The Bucharest Court of Appeals recently issued a sentence against a performance-linked salary system in regies, national companies and state enterprises making losses and arrears. Although it was later reviewed, the original sentence was a memorable one, because it marked the moment when the Romanian Justice took to reformulating economic laws, which obviously no one invented and which exist independently of people’s will. Constitutional provisions were cited when the sentence was established! Well, if constitutional provisions exist that can be interpreted in such a fashion, the Justice should not complain about them, but demand Parliament to rewrite the Constitution itself, so as not to interfere with economic laws, which no Constitution in the world, even that patronised by Antonie Iorgovan, cannot violate, and even if it did, it would be to no avail! For violation of economic laws, the Justice should have issued not only sentences but the money to cover salaries in loss-making enterprises.

Even more, the same Romanian Justice has dazzlingly granted the case to the FNI management company over the controversial legality of its contract with CEC. In that sentence, CEC deponents and, in fact, the Romanian state which guarantees their deposits – in other words, the taxpayers – are liable to pay out of their own pocket the money invested by FNI deponents. Why should the CEC deponents, more than 6 million of them, pay for the adventure of the 300,000 losers of a theft organised by a private financial company, who rushed for quick and easy profit without thinking about the risks? Why didn’t the FNI investors deposit their money directly with CEC, where they had the immediate guarantee of the Romanian state? They didn’t because CEC paid three times less interest than the FNI lied it could offer. Those who got around to cash in such profits from the pyramid scheme called FNI, did by any chance split their money with the Romanian taxpayer or with CEC deponents?

Well, deponents have the right to try and recover their money from somewhere. But what’s that got to do with the Romanian taxpayer? For all it’s worth, let the FNI losers squeeze the reckless Camenco Petrovici as a lemon! Let them demonstrate before the Justice and press it to find those responsible, and thus recover the money. And if it wants to be generous to the FNI investors – although the magistrates who gave the sentence should first take a crash course in personal investments, as opposed to deposits in a bank! – Justice should do it on its own money, not on Romanian taxpayers’ money. To carry out the sentence in question, the money of the Romanian Justice – as much as the Romanian taxpayer, strangled by all kinds of loafers, could provide – would not do to repay even one-third of the FNI investors. But the Romanian Justice delves into politics! How else could we explain that, when the FNI investors are to be repaired by the Romanian taxpayer, the FNI-CEC contract is declared to be legal, and when it came to pressing charges against the former CEC president Camenco Petrovici, the same contract was found illegal, by the same Justice.

In a grotesque way, the Romanian Justice, instead of speeding up the prosecution of proven thieves in the FNI case, as in the hundreds of other cases that led Romania to disaster, pretends to be a prude with a lawyer’s habits, throwing a heavy burden on the shoulders of the tormented citizen and, much more gravely, apparently determined to prove that there can be no justice in Romania: steal all you want, Justice will do nothing, and if someone has to pay the damages, it will rule to have taxpayer do it. Steal and loot, Justice will look after you, the populace will cover the hole! Instead of taking pride in respecting absurd civil and criminal procedures or in exploiting procedural flaws, Justice had better sequester the wealth of proven thieves, so the populace can see that something is being done against those who steal, that something is being recovered of the impoverished national wealth, whose bill the populace will pay.

If Premier Isarescu really wants to be the man to whom so many Romanians entrust their hopes today, he must take the bull by the horns. Of course, he cannot interfere with Justice business, but he can clearly say that if he must lead to the European Union a Romania with this kind of Justice, then someone else had better do it, because the EU will never accept this sort of Romania. Especially that he knows better than anyone else that the budget, which is this close to faltering, cannot play generous and repay the FNI investors, not even with the Justice demanding it. And the budget cannot assume an aberration that has no connection to the Romanian taxpayer.

Mr. Isarescu’s situation is so much more delicate as he, after the lamentable episode of Ordinance 95, by which public money was engaged, as a diversion, in groundless public and private financing, should respond urgently, in the same spirit of responsibility for the Romanian taxpayer and the national budget, to more aberrant pressure to commit to the populace burdens for which it is absolutely not responsible.

Another $100 million are requested from the state, that is, from the populace, for Banca Agricola, to make it fit for privatisation. But some $700 million have been poured into it already! Add another $100 million and then sell it for $25 million? Just for the sake of image? Just so we can say privatisation is going through? Or just because someone, somewhere, decided so? Or because so says the PSAL programme, agreed upon with the World Bank? If the bank is good for nothing, let it go bankrupt, because Banca Agricola is not Bancorex, where state injections were justified in the need to repay some foreign debt.

The Romanian budget cannot afford any further debauchery. The Army has nothing to eat, the police are out of gasoline, hospitals are out of medicine! Whoever touches the Romanian budget for purposes and goals that have nothing to do with the fundamental attributions and functions of public money – such as overt or masked covering of state debts, guided or even forged public acquisitions, private FNI-style compensations, so-called “restructuring” in the banking system – does nothing but brutally assault the national essence of the Romanian people! Let’s see what Justice will do, because laws for an attempt on national security do exist! Unfortunately, a real, genuine Justice, does not!