[Check against delivery]

Florin Cîțu: Good morning and thank you for the invitation! I will start with a brief message. You said very important things and I would like to say in one phrase what this government is about. This government is about reform and investment, with a medium-term development plan. That sums up everything we want to do while in office, this government started very well, and has a horizon over 2024. Now, we are preparing a development plan for Romania until 2028. Things are very simple from this point of view. You mentioned the amount of 76.2 billion euros. This money is for the interval 2022- 2027. Therefore, any plan we devise, we need to take into account this programming. This is why I see a development plan for this period.

I said reform and investment because Romania has to move to the next level. You talked about direct investment in Romania and what we could do to change the paradigm. In my opinion, things are very simple: we are moving to a model of economic development in which jobs, for example, are well-paid, and Romania's attractiveness will no longer be with cheap labour for types of work that had no added value. We change things, we move to well-paid jobs for investment that bring great added value.

In order to be globally competitive, the economy must move towards areas with high added value and high-profit margins, which means skilled labour. We are preparing the ground in Romania for that as well. We will qualify the workforce through state resources, of course, we will do it in partnership with private sector investors.

Romania has a unique opportunity in the next period. It is the amount of 76.2 million euros, 29.2 billion euros of which are from PNRR and the rest from European funds. At the same time, it is a firm commitment of this Cabinet - and I assure you through PNRR, this will be in the future too, towards investing at least 13 billion euros per year from the budget in the economy, you mentioned 60 billion lei, whereas I mentioned it in euro. If we look at 2028, almost 170 billion euros or more than 150 billion euros will be invested in the economy. I want us to look at this figure through what means GDP in Romania today, a GDP of 200 billion euros. So, we will invest in Romania, in the next period, a value close to Romania's GDP at present. This means, first of all, challenges in terms of the labour force, challenges related to the way in which this money is earmarked in the economy, to avoid periods when we cannot invest the money. Because we are in a discussion with the private sector, I would like to tell you a few things from PNRR that might interest you; you know very well, there are over 2 billion euros, money that addresses directly the private sector, so money that can go to the private sector and that is related to digitalization. At the same time, the message is very simple: the over 150 billion euros is money managed by the Romanian state, it invests this money in the economy, but the Romanian state cannot invest without private sector companies, so the vehicle is the Romanian state, it's true, for all the 150 billion euros, but we will make these investments in the economy with companies in the private sector, companies in the field of digitalization, companies in the field of green energy, construction companies. Therefore, not only 2 billion euros from PNRR pertain to the private sector, all the 150 billion euros that come to the economy will go through the private sector. For each project, you need a company on the other side that, of course, will win a contract with a tender that comes from the private sector and will implement these resources in the economy.

That's right, these are things we already know. At the same time, we are fighting internationally for investment. We want more capital, more investments in Romania in addition to these European funds and PNRR and money invested from the budget and, for that, and we are doing certain things. As I said, we look at what has been done wrong so far, why investors did not come to Romania until the present and why investors avoided our country. On the one hand, it is true that the legislation in Romania was not, I would not say friendly, but it was not as clear as necessary and it was easily interpretable and we are working on this legislation, including public procurement legislation. It is part of the reform package we have announced. At the same time, I look at the global competitiveness indicators for Romania. It is the simplest thing, where we can get ideas to reform the economy. There, Romania is worst at authorizing and approving investments. After you have made an investment in Romania, you open a company in three days, four days, but to kick off investment, it can take up to a year, a year and a half. We will reduce all these terms through legislation, in order to make the economic environment much friendlier for foreign investors in Romania. We still maintain the aid schemes and I think the only aid scheme that works is scheme 807 drawn up by the Ministry of Finance, which worked very well for investments of over 1 million euros and there are a few such things, but the direction we are already heading to, produced results. In the first quarter of this year, economic growth was for the first time entirely due to investment. The 2.8 percentage points of economic growth are entirely due to investments. Even public administration consumption fell in the first part of the year, which is all right, allowed the private sector to make investments. We are talking about net investments in the economy, which have grown. The paradigm shift, not to go into details, was clear at the beginning of the mandate, when I said that we will move from a budget that was built on social spending mostly, to a budget that will have more and more investment component, and the two programs, PNRR and European funds, are used to relieve the budget of certain expenditure and to allow the national budget to make investments, to make investment expenditure and other expenditure.

This is the direction we are heading to, it is a government that - I said from the first moment - is close to the private sector and that understands that development comes only through a transparent, trusting relationship with the private sector. The things we said at the beginning of our mandate, remain as we said them and we have always maintained them in front of our discussion partners, with the European Commission, regarding taxes, for example. I do not want us to introduce new taxes in Romania, I do not want to increase the existing taxes. The only parenthesis here is that if decisions on pollution taxes come from the European Commission and so on, we can talk about directives there. Otherwise, as far as I am concerned, this government will not try to increase revenues by penalizing investors and citizens in the private sector. On the contrary, we will increase and we have shown that we will increase budget revenues through voluntary compliance. When you are a reliable and transparent partner of the private sector, budget revenues increase following voluntary compliance. Things are simple from my point of view. I stop in order to have a debate. This was the message that I wanted to convey. We very much appreciate the Romanian -French partnership regarding economic development and the support extended for Romania to be invited to join the OECD. Thank you!