One of the hardest lessons of the last 30 years has been to learn that the Romanian state is, at best, a poor administrator. The rule is that the "efficiency" of the state is only really visible when we think about how public money is wasted and squandered.
This is why FACIAS (The Foundation for the Defense of the Citizen Against State Abuses) has launched an information campaign on the waste of public money by the state.
We have always heard that "there is no money", but a series of simple calculations show that huge amounts of public money have been spent in Romania and yet we still have severely underdeveloped areas such as health and infrastructure. We have an embarrassing average number of kilometres of highway built every year, and what can we say about new state hospitals and clinics? We all know how many have been built.
Champion of waste, the Romanian state has the ability to waste Romanians' money and shows a gross lack of respect for them by the way it makes public spending. For example, the Romanian state wasted money on tens of millions of SARS-COV-2 vaccines that ended up unused or even expired. The money that was wasted on these vaccines could have been used to build a new hospital, which would have been useful given the precarious state of the public health system. We believe that public money is being spent without the benefit of the citizens in mind, and that the campaigns to purchase vaccines could have been much better thought out for the current situation.
The situation with infrastructure is even sadder. Projects are delayed, messed up, renegotiated, until we end up losing hundreds of millions of euros because of the mockery of some. For example, the section of the A1 highway between Sibiu and Pitesti has remained at the same incomplete stage for years, even though we are talking about one of the most important routes in the country. However, the Romanian state spent over €100 million on the feasibility study to start construction of the highway, which has expired. Now, the construction of this stretch of highway has been messed up again, and citizens cannot even benefit from this road and the state has lost €100 million.
The Romanian state is throwing away hundreds of millions of euros on the fines that have been paid to the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) and the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union). More than 99 million euros were paid between 2004 and 2021 and more than 34 million euros in the last two years in compensation following Romania's judgments at the ECHR. Of course, all this money was paid from the state budget. So the state has paid for its incompetence with citizens' money.
Public money is not the state's money, but the citizens' money. Every single coin should be spent with one thing in mind: what benefit it brings to citizens. We decided to start this campaign to show people how their money is being spent and that a change is needed to put an end to this phenomenon. FACIAS stands by the people and will continue to support them against state abuses.
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Închideți robinetul risipei: Răspunsul primit de FACIAS de la Ministerul Transporturilor și CNAIR