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The public servants with the Transport Ministry are very courageous to allot from public funds subsidies for the rail transport of people, on their own responsibility, without an electronic system in place to check what happened to this money, Bogdan Chiritoiu, the chair of the Competition Council, told on Wednesday the conference "Modern and efficient: rolling stock that Romania needs," organized by Club Feroviar.
"It's a domain full of opportunities, but we manage to miss these opportunities nonchalantly. I don't see the problem necessarily with politicians. I should say you have a systemic problem here. It's not a domain with such a large political influence, in the sense that people from outside the system are not parachuted in. There are people who worked in the domain, it's a rather structured world," said Chiritoiu.
According to him, those in the rail sector have not been able for years to make an electronic system to monitor how many tickets are issued and on what routes, yet the public servants in the ministry still provide subsidies from public money for rail transport.
"So the fact that public servants, subject to the control of the Court of Accounts, with the risk of the Prosecutor's Office, have the courage to sign to allot public funds in the form of subsidies for rail transport without being able, for years, to have an electronic system that would count how many tickets were sold and we go on statements of own responsibility. So we give public money on own responsibility, someone signs, and you have no system to check that those things actually happen...,"said Chiritoiu.
He showed that, in order for the system to be financed, firstly we need to know its necessities, something that is not currently happening.
"We equally subsidize all routes, we haven't made an analysis where there's more need for trains, what route needs fewer. We haven't been able for years to prepare with anything. We keep throwing money out the window for the technical consultant," Chiritoiu added.
"We can't blame Finance any more, because we're a poor country and the state doesn't give money anymore, it's a systemic problem," he emphasized, reports agerpres.
