Romania pays back some EU funds, has another EUR 1 bln blocked

Romania has returned EUR 230 million of the EU funds it has spent in the last five years due to financial corrections, according to a study made by the Public Policy Institute, a local NGO. Almost 3,000 corrections were registered for the 17,000 financing contracts signed in the analyzed period. More than 500 of those were fraud suspicions and the judicial authorities were notified in 188 cases. The highest rate of financial corrections to contracts signed was registered in the Operational Programme for Environment - 76%. The EU recently suspended EUR 1 billion worth of financings for projects in Romania based on corruption suspicions, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta told international journalists. He said that the projects were blocked because of complaints that were automatically investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF. The suspicions target several human resource projects as well as the EUR 400 million contract for new subway trains acquisition. Spanish group CAF won the contract, but the other competitors filed complaints challenging the procedure. If OLAF doesn’t solve these cases by year-end, Romania won’t be able to get the EU funding and will have to finance the contracts from state funds. Romania reached an overall EU funds absorption rate of 54.22% at the end of April, 1.1 percentage points higher than at the end of March, according to the European Funds Ministry. The country managed to draw some EUR 10.33 billion from the EU for the 2007-2013 budgeting period, and still has some EUR 8.7 billion available. The money will be available until the end of this year after which any undrawn funds will be lost. editor@romania-insider.com