Sorin Grindeanu, clarifications about the PSD initiative on the law on magistrates' pensions: “If you follow the same path, you are actually assuming that the project will be rejected a second time”

The interim president of the PSD, Sorin Grindeanu, says that he followed “one thing” at the meeting held on Friday with “all relevant actors in the judiciary” on the subject of the project on the pensions of magistrates.

“I want to clarify the whole process once again. We have a project that, by assuming liability, was declared unconstitutional in form, not maintaining the substance. And it was rejected by the CCR. We have a date, November 28, by which we must have a new project, otherwise we will lose 231 million euros, being a limit in the PNRR”, Sorin Grindeanu, in Buzău, declared on Saturday, in a press conference.

Grindeanu's statements come a day after the PSD leader met with the president of the CSM, Elena Costache, with the president of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, Lia Savonea, and with the general prosecutor Alex Florenta, for discussions on the project on magistrates' pensions, rejected by the CCR.

“We have a rightful social dissatisfaction related to the retirement age, 48, 49 years, the amount of the pension, which must be fixed and we have two possibilities: to go the same way by engaging the responsibility with the same form of law as proposed in the coalition by Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan or to try to see if there is willingness to dialogue on the part of the others and quickly make a draft law, so that on the 28th let's get it promulgated and not lose that money”, Grindeanu explained.

The PSD leader says that he wanted from this discussion to find out if the “main actors in the judiciary” are open to dialogue for the resumption of the draft law.

“I think that if you try to go down the same road, the second time, and you expect a different finality, in fact I think that you assume that the project will be rejected the second time. What I did yesterday I did as president of the Chamber of Deputies, I tried and had a dialogue with the president of the High Court, with the president of the CSM and with the Prosecutor General of Romania. I only wanted one thing from this meeting: to ask them if there is availability for dialogue. If so, I will go to the coalition and tell my colleagues that the main actors in this field of justice want to come and have a dialogue to quickly draft a law”, declared Grindeanu.

“This is what I am going to convey to them and I conveyed to some of the leaders of the coalition: that yes, the judiciary or the main actors in the judiciary want to come and have this dialogue. There was no discussion of the amount, the period, of… This is the only thing I followed them: to ask if they want to have this dialogue, considering that in recent weeks there has been tension between those I mentioned and the government, and I think we must overcome this moment”, he Grindeanu also said.

“I want us to make a law in dialogue with these people, otherwise if we believe that we are the holders of the absolute truth it would be the same finality, we will lose that amount of money and worse we will not have a law to correct this injustice”, Grindeanu concluded.

Tensions in the coalition on the subject of magistrates' pensions

After Monday's decision of the Constitutional Court, Sorin Grindeanu launched a series of attacks on Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan. In the PSD coalition, he had requested the creation of a working group, but was met with a refusal from the prime minister and the other parties.

PSD sources told HotNews that, in order for the project to be accepted by the magistrates, the party proposes two amendments to the law of the Bolojan Government, declared unconstitutional by the CCR:

• To increase the amount of the pension to 75% of the last net salary, instead of 70%.
• The transition period should increase to 15 years instead of 10.

The PSD would like the new project for the reform of magistrates' pensions to be submitted to Parliament by the end of next week and to be adopted by November 28.