Zero priority in the political crisis: We can lose almost 400 million euros from the PNRR if we do not quickly reduce the number of temporary administrators in local state companies / “A solution is magic”

Romania risks losing “at least half” of more than 770 million euros from the PNRR if it fails to reduce by 10% the number of provisional administrators in local state companies by August 31, 2026, Dragoș Pîslaru, the Minister of European Investments and Projects, warned on Tuesday. “In these local companies, the people who were in the administration there were appointed, without contests, and it is very clear at this moment, that we are not talking about a decreasing trend in the number of interims, but rather an increasing trend,” he said.

• Provisional administrators in state or local companies are those persons appointed to temporarily manage a commercial company subordinated to a public authority (such as a City Hall or a County Council), until the selection process of full-term administrators is completed, usually for 4 years.

Minister Dragoș Pîslaru spoke about this danger on Tuesday at the Government during a conference organized by AMEPIP on the topic of meeting the PNRR benchmarks in the field of corporate governance.

The emergency is at milestone 442: “Reduction of interim appointments to administrative/supervisory boards by 50% for state-owned enterprises under the purview of central public authorities and by 10% for state-owned enterprises under the purview of local public authorities.

The milestone has an allocation of over 771 million euros from the PNRR.

Instead of decreasing, the trend is increasing

“On the situation of central interims, we are doing well. When I say good, I don't say very well, I say good. I mean, we are in discussions with the European Commission and we can present some figures in which we show that, and this is the merit of this exercise from the PNRR, these interims have been reduced and we can say that we are satisfied with this reduction indicator”, said Pîslaru.

At the local level, however, things are not good, because the tendency has been to keep creating small local companies

“In these local companies, the people who were in the administration there were appointed, without contests, and it is very clear at this moment that we are not discussing a tendency to decrease the number of interims, but rather a tendency to increase”, declared Dragoș Pîslaru.

The minister says that he is currently negotiating with European Commission officials the possibility of amending Emergency Ordinance 109/2011 on the corporate governance of public enterprises, so that the rules no longer apply to very small companies that have only a few employees.

“And what we discussed with the European Commission, we said like this: shouldn't there be a proportionality regime? I mean, don't apply the rules of Ordinance 109 to a company of, I know, three employees, where, in order to appoint an entire board of directors with all those rules, I would give more money to the board of directors as much as I had the company's budget. And what we are discussing with the Commission now, is part of the negotiations for the European this 442, is to amend 109 so that for smaller local companies, which are below certain thresholds, in terms of number of employees and turnover, they no longer enter the reporting regime.” he said.

Discussions are now on these thresholds.

“Anyway, if we don't change the threshold, we don't meet that indicator and we have two options,” Pîslaru said.

“If it happens it's exactly what I'm telling you: magic!”

The minister is now discussing the modification of the target requested by the European Commission.

“One that is my personal magic, which is to try to convince them to remove this target altogether, which I can't promise you, but if it happens it's exactly what I'm telling you: magic! I mean, Romania couldn't, we remove it and put something else in place for the money. We'll see at the right time how we do.

The other is to try to fulfill it through this change in legislation based on proportionality. I repeat, we are negotiating more details than we have given you now, I cannot give you”, said Dragoș Pîslaru.

What is the risk? How much money can we lose from the 770 million euros?

“Probably, if we were to look now, that there are two elements in the legislation, we can expect that at least half of the total amount will be affected if we stay and do not do or modify something. But if, in order to understand the consequences, we either negotiate with the European Commission to drop this reform and introduce something else or the other option to try to fulfill most of it, then the penalty would decrease proportionally,” he said.

AMEPIP Vice-President: “We have companies with which we have been on probation for 16 years”

Bogdan Stănescu, one of the two vice-presidents of AMEPIP, the super agency that controls and checks performance in state-owned companies, also spoke about this issue at the conference.

“Taking care of governance, I also drew the short stick, going on the milestone 442 of reducing temporary staff in state companies, where the Romanian Government agreed that at the central level we should reduce temporary staff by 50% compared to 2020 and by 10% at the local level”, said Bogdan Stănescu.

If at the central level we managed to cross this threshold, the same is not happening at the local level, he said.

“And I'm not telling you that we have companies where we've been on probation for 16 years. Whether you stay on probation for 16 years or 600 days without an administration plan, without a management component, without an investment idea, without an assumption of company development, it doesn't mean corporate governance. It means everything else purely Romanian. These things are not tolerable from my point of view and from the AMEPIP management's point of view, that's why, probably, you will see in the coming months these reactions of AMEPIP to such methods”, said the vice-president of AMEPIP.

The stage of reducing the number of provisional administrators

The Agency for the Monitoring and Evaluation of the Performance of Public Enterprises (AMEPIP) became operational from January 1, 2026, and on Tuesday presented its activity report for the first three months of this year. The agency has 81 employees and must monitor nearly 1,350 public companies at central and local level.

Target 442 of the PNRR is defined as the numerical reduction of the number of temporary administrators (short-term appointments based on art. 64¹ GEO no. 109/2011) compared to the reference year 2020, according to the clarifications received from the European Commission on February 18, 2026.

At central level, the −50% target is achieved according to official ONRC data. More precisely, it is a 62.8% reduction rate (from 226 to 84 provisional administrators), exceeding the 50% threshold by 12.8 percentage points.

At the local level, the official rate is undergoing methodological reconciliation — the ONRC baseline as of 12/31/2020 reflects a systematic historical underestimation, which is why AMEPIP has officially requested the completion of 2020 data through formal addresses to the ONRC and the Ministry of Finance.

On March 31, 2021, the official ONRC situation reflected 508 provisional administrators at the level of 1255 local public companies, the AMEPIP report also states.

Milestone 442, among the 9 targets where Romania risks losing over 7 billion euros

Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan also warned on Monday about the danger of losing more than 770 million euros from the PNRR, due to the non-fulfillment of milestone 442, before the PSD-AUR censure motion was announced.

“We need to approve 9 laws that will regulate different areas, as described below, from public sector pay to fiscal or energy issues. Voting the 9 laws will be, beyond disputes and different approaches, a test of responsibility for the political class in Romania,” said Bolojan.

In the case of milestone 442, the indicated solution is to adopt “legislation on the regulation of the proportional regime for the reporting obligations of state-owned enterprises under the responsibility of local public authorities”.