Reviewing Romanian government’s balance sheet
Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Cioloş urged cabinet members to assess their work after a year in office. The move should reflect achievements and failures also including unfinalised projects, Mr. Cioloş said at a cabinet meeting in the capital Bucharest on Wednesday. „We should come foreward and explain. It is our first balance sheet, and I rather believe that it is a cabinet job as, you see, there are others ready to do it and then claim that we were a ‘zero goverment’. However, we can agree with them, and say ‘yes, we are the government of zero corruption, zero populism, zero lies’, and we should explain the things we did this year. As I already said at the start of the mandate, we did not expect to start a new revolution in Romania. We said we would try to promote some reforms in key areas, and I thought we should now explain what we did”, Mr. Cioloş pointed out.
Romania’s state secretary for revolutionaries under arrest
The head of Romania’s State Secretariat for Revolutionaries was arrested for alleged illegal dealings on Wednesday. Adrian Sanda illegally awarded revolutionary titles to people for their alleged leading role in the victory of the Romanian revolution in December 1989, prosecutors say. Several people were questioned for their alleged involvement into the case while officers with the country’s General Prosecutor’s Office raided homes and offices in the capital Bucharest and five other counties. Most of the 3,500 so-called revolutionaries were not entitled to receive the award (some Ron 2,000) as they failed to meet the criteria, prosecutors concluded. The new award was introduced in 2014 through an emergency ordinance.
Fate of a former MEP under question
A big story in the Romania is the ate of Adrian Severin, a former foreign minister and then member of the European Parliament. Mr. Severin is accused of taking bribes from British journalists posing as lobbyists while he is still denying any wrongdoing. The former MEP was initially sentenced to three years and a half in jail. Mr Severin said he had done nothing that was „illegal or against any normal behaviour”. „We have the right… to work as political consultants, the only requirement being that we not hand out confidential information”, Mr. Severin said at the time as quoted by „The Economist”. The former MEP was initially sentenced to three years and a half in jail. However, a final decision is expected on Wednesday./adanga
Alexandru Danga
