Prime Minister Florin Cîţu attended the video-conference titled 'The Stock Exchange in the year of the health crisis and economic uncertainties'

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Florin Cîţu: Good morning and thank you for the invitation! As you said, it is a complicated time, we have to manage the health crisis. It is a pleasure to be here today, because, in fact, this is the reality we all long for, to be close to entrepreneurs, to the private sector. They are the people who generate added value in the economy. You said that last year was a difficult year, but, if we look at the turnover, not only of the Bucharest Stock Exchange but that all the stock exchanges in the world had, we see that it increased. It is true in Romania, we had a record, maybe also due to the fact that the Romanian capital market was introduced in the FTSE Russell Emerging Markets index. Maybe this helped a lot too. I congratulated the capital market, the stock exchange, I congratulate them even now. It is an important thing to attract investors in Romania. After all, the capital market is based on investment, national or foreign, we need investment. I'd like to take a look at what happened last year, what we did last year, and then, we can talk about the future.

There are two important things the state did last year. One: it injected liquidity or helped liquidity through that issue of Fidelis securities, almost one billion euros, so this was important and I say it helped a lot. But much more important, and with long-term implications, was the amendment of legislation that helps capitalize on Romanian companies. It was a decision I made last year. Looking at the experience of the last 20-30 years, a structural issue in Romania is that we have private companies that have negative capitalization. We created this incentive, this motivation for companies to capitalize. It is a program that has been running for five years, with bonuses of up to 15% per year from the profit tax, just to have companies that show their real financial situation, to capitalize; then we can talk about a healthy economy. I think it is very important to have these healthy companies because that is how we show investors that we are ready to receive capital. These are the two measures that I think have helped the capital market a lot and will help in the next period too. For me, the important thing is - I've been told it many times and you've seen that immediately after we had that lockdown last year, I said I don't want to have a lockdown anymore - that we can mostly have an open economy, and also fight the pandemic as well; so far, we have managed to do this, and we will continue to do so. You said it in your way, I keep saying that it takes a healthy economy, resources to have healthy people in order to allocate resources in the health system, to have everything - intensive care beds, and medicines, and pay the doctors, and give them a bonus in difficult situations and so on - but, you also need healthy people, to have a strong economy. So the two go together. And that was, in fact, the balance that we had to keep throughout last year by means of the measures that we took.

Looking at this year and what's next, it matters what we want and what this coalition wants from this economy. In my opinion, it is high time to make the transition, and we must do it quickly, to a competitive, digitalized economy that promotes know-how, technology, a modern economy. This is the right time! Now, we have to make the transition and we have to do it swiftly, not in four years - this is the challenge ahead for us.

Without a strong economy, an economy that is competitive in the EU, also globally, the rest, everything we hear in the public space, is just populist promises and we should be aware of this.

From my point of view, everything we do through the act of government should lead to a strong economy, a competitive economy, an economy that will stand on its own two feet and we no longer have to have that attitude of waiting for investors to come to us - we are preparing and waiting - but let us go after investors ourselves. Therefore, we need to enter the playing field, to attract investment. Hopefully, the strategy for the development of the capital market will be approved and completed fast, this will help a lot, this is a very important thing and it should happen as soon as possible. The Government has already adopted a draft law that was submitted to Parliament to repeal last year's nonsense that did not allow state-owned companies to be listed. I hope this will happen as soon as possible.

Minister of Economy is here, he can tell you if there are companies in the coordination of the ministry that can be listed or not, they are also in the energy sector, and there are several sectors where we can find candidates for the capital market. That is part of the bigger reform of state institutions because another pledge we made to the Romanian citizens and I want to honour it, to eliminate the waste of public money and keep public spending in check. And we have something which helps us a lot, and which we need to capitalize on, over the next period: the very good assessment from Standard & Poor's. It has never happened for the assessment of an outlook to return so fast, after hardly one year time. That shows very clearly that what we promised, we partially achieved and our plans are trustworthy. That is the most important, that we want to achieve these things and we raised them in a credible way. We need to capitalize on this, and to search the obstacles that hindered investors to come here. I have a couple of ideas about the way we treat private property: for instance, the number of permits, the waiting time until you get them. These are important issues but we also need to make clear to foreign investors that private property is guaranteed in Romania, there is no problem, no risks in this regard, I think we will make a big difference over the next period.

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