PM Citu: We need to check again into how some of the ministries scheduled their budget execution

 

He added that more needs to be done, giving assurances that the target of 64 billion lei spent on investments will be reached by the end of the year.

 

"21.3 billion lei (investments in the first six months of the year). On the one hand, if I check what happened last year with investments and compared to the past 10 years, yes, investments are at a record level, they are by 5 billion lei higher than last year. Also, if I look at the budget execution, as I also explained yesterday, we could have done better, more. I had a discussion today at the end of the meeting with my colleagues in the government on budget execution, where I said that there are many projects that were in the budget and have almost zero execution, which is not admissible from my point of view. Which is why we need to check again the way in which the budget execution was scheduled for several ministries. So, from this point of view, more needs to be done, and today I told my colleagues to check what happened in the first six months, what stopped them from carrying out some of the projects," Citu told a press conference at the Victoria Palace.

 

According to the PM, there are several causes for which the amount of 64 billion lei in investments has not been reached, adding that this result will be achieved by the end of the year.

 

Regarding the data published by the Ministry of Finance on the absorption of European funds - about 12.5 billion lei, compared to an assumption by the Budget Law of over 40 billion lei, the head of the Executive explained: "It is not a big discrepancy. You know very well that budget execution is... Maybe there was a discussion there related to the quarterly scheduling. We will recover in the second part, for sure."