Bolojan talks about what generated “total dissatisfaction” in the PSD: “I no longer allowed these things.” He calls the area the “worst situations” and gives an “example of what it means to make fun of public money by not investing”

Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan claims that for years the state budget was used “as a piggy bank by non-performing administrations”, and a “total dissatisfaction” appeared in the PSD when he introduced a “certain fiscal discipline”. “You save for nothing, if inside the money is plundered,” said Bolojan, who also gave examples of companies that he says have wasted public money.

Ilie Bolojan was asked on Thursday, on Rock FM, what was the red line he crossed from the point of view of the governing partners.

“It was an evolution in which, after this coalition was formed and we took the first measures in a month or two, things worked relatively normally. There was a lot of pressure, if we remember, in the summer of next year to present to the European Commission a first package of measures to show that we will correct the budget deficit, because otherwise they would suspend our European funds, which would have created great complications for us. Then, gradually, gradually, the PSD, because we were taking measures that were not popular, which they invalidated the theory that if someone votes for us, we have a cornucopia from which we can solve all the citizens' wishes, the opposition inside the government started to play this trick”, said Ilie Bolojan.

Bolojan accused that the PSD was in the government in the morning, and at noon the social democrats reported from the meetings things that did not happen or that happened differently, trying “to pose as those who opposed, in the public space”.

“As we evolved, we didn't just deal with deficit and revenue consolidation, in the sense of revenue growth. We started to go into spending cuts. We started to check where the problems are in governance, to discover the hidden pantries that are not right and turn on the light. That generated some problems,” said Bolojan.

“I began to discover the hidden pantries”

Next, the prime minister said that “for years the state budget was used as a piggy bank by non-performing administrations”.

“We started to check where the problems are in the government, to discover the hidden pantries that are not right and to turn on the light. That generated some problems. On the one hand, think that for years the state budget was used as a piggy bank by non-performing administrations and people who, in their counties, function like peasants. They thought that the old habits of calling, solving their incompetence, inefficiency through allocations directed from the state budget will continue to work. It was no longer possible, because you cannot reduce your expenses if you do not introduce a certain fiscal discipline. This created a total dissatisfaction, because things
which operated according to a certain framework could no longer work”, the prime minister explained.

Bolojan believes that a third wave of dissatisfaction among the PSD was when he took measures to eliminate losses from state companies.

“A third wave was when, indeed, we tried to stop the looting of public money, to take measures to combat tax evasion, to eliminate waste and losses from state companies, to allow, for example, the access of energy producers to the national system, because you cannot lower the price of energy if you do not have more production. And not everyone loses from a high energy price. The economic agent, the Romanian company, loses to competitiveness, the citizen loses. But those who are in these areas have important gains. Or, all these things led us to this situation and we could no longer have signs that we do things in a certain way, and have completely different behaviors inside,” declared Ilie Bolojan.

“You save for nothing, if inside the money is looted”

Bolojan said he “didn't allow these things anymore”.

“Why? Because the moment you want to reduce deficits, because we can no longer bear them, you improve your collection in vain, you make savings in vain, if the money is raided internally, it is lost. If you tolerate this, on the one hand, you cannot reduce the deficit, do good for Romania”, said Bolojan.

“I'll give you another example of what it means to mock public money”

Next, Prime Minister Bolojan said that one of the worst situations we have is in the energy area.

The prime minister criticized Hidroelectrica for the way it has managed its business in recent years, saying it has not invested enough in modernization or development, and management “collected performance bonuses every year for profits they did not strive for”.

“I would give you another example of what it means to make fun of the public money by not making investments. Consider that Hidroelectrica in these years made few investments. They preferred to make profits, because anyway the water in Romania flows from hill to valley, so it goes through hydropower plants, through dams, instead of making investments”, said Ilie Bolojan, in an interview with Rock FM, published on Thursday.

The Prime Minister says that if storage batteries had been installed near the dams, the energy produced at noon could have been used in the evening, which would have brought higher profits for the company and lower energy prices for consumers.

“Think that if next to every dam that is on the water course, not in the mountainous area, which must work, because you cannot stop the water, we would have installed some storage batteries for a year or two, in such a way that all the production between lunch hours would be stored and would be released in the evening, it would have meant higher profits for Hidroelectrica and it would have meant 20-30% lower prices on the energy market in Romania for our citizens”, he said Bolojan.

Instead, says Bolojan, “they preferred to take performance bonuses every year for the profits they did not struggle for of 150,000 – 180,000 euros, in addition to the high salaries they have.”

“Instead of making these investments, if they had made them, they would have left a lot of space, very little space to trade in the markets. And those who make money from the operations that happen in the daily markets would have had a much smaller margin of movement and the price of energy would have gone down,” Bolojan said.

What Bolojan says about the situation at Metrorex

The prime minister said that there are “many areas like this” and went on to give the example of Metrorex, where the interim Minister of Transport, Radu Miruță, signed an order on Wednesday suspending the application of the new price increases for 60 days and announced that he had found several irregularities.

“Mr. Minister Miruță presented the case from Metrorex yesterday. There are some anomalies that instead of reducing your expenses, controlling your expenses, you move the inefficiency into the final price, into the final energy price, in the case of monopolistic energy companies who are not interested, because anyway there are no other producers and anyway they produce 60% of Romania's energy, three state companies, and in the price of tickets to monopolistic transport companies or in subsidies of millions of euros which we give in enormous losses every year. And any company that is in this situation, if they don't have a management that really looks at the expenses and doesn't make fun of the money they
collect,” Bolojan said.

“If they don't do this, what do they do? They move with the losses, they move with the black holes in population prices, tariff prices, megawatt prices or in subsidies from the state budget. And, I told you, no matter how much we collect, no matter how much we struggle to increase collection, increase taxes, no matter how much we reduce expenses, if we don't correct these things…”, Bolojan added.