Deputy Prime Minister Oana Gheorghiu demands control of the institution that administers state assets: “We don't know how much they owe, we don't know how much was recovered”

Deputy Prime Minister Oana Gheorghiu announced on Thursday that she requested checks from the Prime Minister's Control Body on the activity of the Authority for the Administration of State Assets (AAAS), pointing out the lack of essential data on the administration of state assets and a record that has not been updated for over two decades, according to Agerpres.

He also requested the notification of the Court of Accounts for the evaluation of the activity of this institution.

“Last month, I requested from AAAS the complete situation of the entities that it administers on behalf of the Romanian state: holdings, claims, legal proceedings – an x-ray of the portfolio. I sent an Excel form to be filled out, with deadlines and calculation formulas. What I received back was a seven-page letter with the institution's legislative history since 1991, a partially filled-in form and the explanation that providing a centralized situation would require – I quote – 'an enormous amount of work', for that the database has not been updated since 2001. We are talking about an institution that has been managing state assets for more than 35 years,” Oana Gheorghiu wrote on her Facebook page.

She emphasized that she analyzed the data we received, from which it emerged that AAAS has 1,260 records in its portfolio – over a thousand distinct entities -, of which 520 refer to entities in which the state is a creditor or shareholder, but for 438 of them, representing 84%, the institution did not fill in any financial field.

Oana Gheorghiu: The state must know exactly what it administers, what it has to recover, what must be closed and who must answer

“In other words: we don't know how much they owe; we don't know how much has been recovered; we don't know what the state's exposure is. For 69% of the entire portfolio, AAAS did not report any institutional action. For almost 870 entities we don't know if AAAS did something – or did nothing. From the partial data we had to process manually, it results in an exposure of 2.765 billion lei and amounts recovered by 206 million lei. A recovery rate of only 7.48%. And this is calculated on the basis of the available data, “the deputy prime minister explained.

According to the quoted source, 109 insolvency proceedings exceed 5 years, 93 – 10 years, 30 exceed 20 years, and in each of them, the procedural costs accumulate monthly – practitioner fees, administrative expenses – with no realistic prospect of recovery.

“I want to be clear: based on the lack of data, it is impossible to determine whether or not there has been any damage. And this is, in itself, a serious finding. Beyond the two measures mentioned at the beginning, we have asked for an independent audit to quantify exactly what has been lost – time-barred claims, missed deadlines, procedures maintained that do not make economic sense. The third step, conditional on the audit, is to assess the feasibility of maintaining AAAS in its current form. A serious state cannot administers the public patrimony in this logic of chaos,” the deputy prime minister said.

In his opinion, you cannot claim discipline, efficiency and responsibility in the economy, if the very institution that administers claims and holdings on behalf of the state “cannot quickly, clearly and completely present its own record”.

“We cannot seriously reform the state if we accept opacity, improvisation and procedures that drag on endlessly without results. The state must know exactly what it administers, what it has to recover, what must be closed and who must answer,” Oana Gheorghiu also wrote on her social media page.