Mihai Daraban, CCIR: “The Government should choose other targets for new taxes, because the business environment is a living organism that eventually finds antibodies to poison”

“The capacity of the business environment to pay additional taxes has been exhausted. More cannot be done. There have been no spectacular inflows of direct investment into Romania, because we are no longer an attractive country.

The Government should choose other targets for new taxes, because the business environment is a living organism that eventually finds antibodies to poison,” Mihai Daraban, president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania, said in a press conference.

“Administrative reorganization has once again become a topic on the public agenda. We must reduce state spending to have a comfortable budget and to be able to offer facilities for investments that we greatly need. To bring investors to Romania, you must be attractive.

Romanian diplomacy does not exist. There is no performance criterion for Romania’s diplomatic missions abroad.

I want to emphasize that we are not against public sector employees, which every country needs. At the level of health, education, the army, ministries, we do not reach 600,000 employees. But we have 1.3 million public servants, compared to 900,000 in Poland. Where are these public servants? There are 467,000 employees in the local public administration and the rest are in the central public administration. This is the big problem. Romania can no longer function in this paradigm.

This is a long-term effort, but there are also short-term measures that can be taken by the Government.

There are a lot of state assets that do not produce anything and we could organize an auction through which we could sell them, introduce them into the economic circuit and bring money into the state budget. I am talking here about decommissioned military units, abandoned depots, research institutes where there are still 2 people and a dog, etc.

Each minister should analyse the portfolio he manages and make a transparent list of the assets that we could capitalize on at the auction.

The country’s economic stability would increase significantly if we managed to achieve an administrative reorganization, which would create the premises for a budget that would allow us to make the investments that Romania needs.”