PM Ungureanu plans to form a national fund to finance direct investments

2012-04-04 14:58:11

Prime Minister Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu plans to form a national development fund targeting direct investments in Romania, according to a recent statement. The fund would be fed with money resulting from privatizations, state-companies listings and royalties. According to Ungureanu, the money will not feed the state budget. “We will do a different thing. We already working at a project built after the Norwegian model, to form a national development fund. The fund is meant to be free of executive power influence and which would exclusively use money resulting from royalties, privatizations, and stock exchange listings,” stated Ungureanu this week. The fund could be managed also by representatives included within the recently-created Consulting Council for businesses, according to Ungureanu. The main target of such a fund would be to use the collected money to direct investments and to be safe from any political involvement. Within this context, the PM stated that so far, the money obtained from Petrom and Romanian Commercial bank’s privatizations has been used to pay the budget salaries and the pensions. “Yes. The State borrowed money from those funds to pay salaries and pensions. In the meantime, it forgot to replace it,” said Ungureanu.