Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan tried on Thursday evening to nuance one of his most controversial statements, the one regarding the “rats in the pantry”.
The head of the government was asked, on the podcast The News Man, made on YouTube by the journalist Radu Andrei Tudor, “where did the rats come from”, he explained that it is a metaphor that can be easily understood by anyone.
“I gave a plastic example, a figure of speech, which refers to the fact that when a householder fills his pantry, I don't know, with grains, he gathered them hard in vain, he uses them sparingly in vain if there are rodents that make dust of everything he gathered there. Of course, this was an example, it has nothing to do with people. But it's very clear, for anyone to understand”, said Bolojan.
“The reality is this: no matter how hard we try to collect our revenues, no matter how much we raise taxes to a bearable level, no matter how many savings we make, if we don't take some measures so that the country's financial resources are no longer wasted, if we don't create the right conditions for certain things to be resolved, the transition from mediocre governments to good governance will not be possible,” added the prime minister.
Bolojan: In the field of energy “it's crazy”
“Any rational person understands that in order to have a better price for coffee or water, for example, we should have a higher production, so that competition appears, to lower prices. The same is true in the field of energy. Romania uses approximately 9,000 megawatts in the winter, and between 5,500 and 6,000 megawatts in the summer. That's how much the Romanian economy consumes, both citizens and companies in a day. For to be able to have cheaper energy, we must support the production that is constant, mainly on gas, but also the storage component, so that a quarter of the production is photovoltaic and solar producers to electricity networks, issuing connection authorizations for companies that do not make any investment, because this has been seen for years, which are companies without employees, which are newly established”, continued the head of government.
Bolojan also said that in the field of energy “it's crazy” and explained how the prices came to rise.
“It's crazy here. We have issued authorizations of 80,000 megawatts, another 30,000 in processing, so against the 9,000 required we have 120,000 megawatts issued or in processing and it is much more than the capacity of our networks. We have practically blocked this. Surely… no one has seen something like this for 2 years? This was tolerated due to weak regulations, due to the fact that Transelectrica (…) tolerated this, but of course this brought profits to some, who made some healthy money. But this was done on the backs of our citizens, because not having energy production you have to pay 10-20-30% more expensive energy. And all these blockages were tolerated and profited by those who were able to speculate, who were obviously in a certain convenience and with certain connections with those who tolerated it.” Bolojan also said, referring to the so-called “smart guys” in energy.
In parallel with The News Man Podcast, the president of the PSD, Sorin Grindeanu, made statements on Antena 3 CNN on Thursday evening regarding the censure motion to be debated next week in the Parliament.
Two weeks ago, on April 17, Ilie Bolojan, on Radio România Actualității, said that he found “rats in the state's pantry eating away at supplies.”
“Think that in that pantry that the householder still has, when you open the door, you see that you have some mice, some rats, which are like rodents that gnaw your food and, very plastically, you know, I turned on the light bulbs, that's as clear as possible. It's not my point, but that's what I tried, to make light there, and that was disturbing,” the prime minister declared at that time.
