Romania had over 20,000 companies with assets of over EUR 1 million at the end of 2015, and about 3,000 of them were on the verge of insolvency, Cristina Ienciu, head of legal at local insolvency firm CITR, said yesterday at a conference organized by News.ro.

Some 660,000 companies were active in Romania at the end of 2015.

The 20,000 companies with assets of over EUR 1 million represent the Romanian economy’s “locomotive”, Ienciu explained. They employ 1.9 million people of a total of 4.8 million employees in the local economy.

The number of companies that become insolvent will naturally go down, but companies choose insolvency when it’s too late, Daniel Barbu, representative of the National Institute for Training Insolvency Practitioners (INPPI), said at the same conference.

"Why are there so few reorganizations? Because companies get into insolvency very late. You can’t reorganize when the debt level is very high,” he added.

editor@romania-insider.com