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The pressure on the budget is high, but not that massive, the state is paying its bills, the Sibiu - Pitesti motorway will be built this year and the metro line to the Drumul Taberei Bucharest quarter will also be completed this year, Public Finance Minister Florin Citu told public broadcaster TVR 1 on Thursday evening.
"We didn't halt works on any construction site in Romania. Secondly, this is the first budget revision I can recall that doesn't cut money from the Transport Ministry, on the contrary, we supplemented the Ministry's revenues with 135 million lei. And if necessary, we'll add funding at the next budget revision again. I am optimistic: I have seen that the economy performs better than I expected. After the first days when everything was put on hold, we would have expected a much stronger shock. But I looked at the revenues and after I talked to the companies that kept going and which started paying their dues, I can tell you the results are good. Things look OK. The pressure on the budget is high, yet not that massive. The state is paying its bills, and in March we paid 4 billion lei in VAT refunds," FinMin Florin Citu said.
He mentioned that the government raises loans to make sure that pensions, wages and bills are paid on time, but also in order to maintain investments in the economy.
"Romania is running a deficit, this means that budget revenues are lower than expenditures and we cover the difference from loans. The deficit for 2020 has increased from 3.7 to 6.7 percent. We used this budget revision to allocate more money to the Labor Ministry which continues to pay furlough benefits for a great part of the Romanians who, unfortunately, are affected today by this crisis. We allocated almost one billion euros to the Health Ministry and almost one billion lei of this amount will go into the settlement of sick leave pays. When I took over this ministry last November, we were almost two years behind with sick leave payments. Now the lag has been reduced to almost a year," Florin Citu said.
