Basescu Attacks Tariceanu

Corruption in health, customs, the energetic area, in the Petrom privatization, and the Government has the strings. These were yesterday’s accusations from President Traian Basescu, who started an amazing attack against Prime Minister Tariceanu.

Yesterday, President Traian Basescu ended his holiday to take part in a show at Radio Romania Actualitati to accuse Prime Minister Tariceanu of knowing about the influence exercised by several economical groups against the Government from 21 documents received from SRI (the Romanian Secret Services). "It is the time for us to stop lying", says Basescu while threatening he would ask for the classified information from SRI, if needed. The President accuses the corruption inside the areas of health, customs, energy, as well as the pressures exercised for the Government to take a measure according to which 8% of the Petrom shares were supposed to get into the hands of a before-known person. In an unprecedented attack, Basescu accuses Tariceanu of giving up on the idea of the before-term elections due to the same pressures and asks him to decide who his Governing partner is: the President or the group outside the Government.

INTERESTS "I think it is time for us to stop lying. The Prime Minister received 21 documents from SRI. They are important documents that cannot be made public. If I am forced to do it, I will ask for them not to be classified, in order to prove the lie. 4 of them had been presented to the President as well, but 17 of them were for the strict use of the Government. (…) They are about influences upon state secretaries, ministries and so on. This is the reason for which I am surprised of the trap that the Prime Minister has been pushed into by people surrounding him. They made him ask publicly the SRI for those documents. (…)

The SRI gave him those documents and I was surprised to find out the things Mr. Prime Minister knew about the influences around some ministries and ministers".

PETROM "I talked to some ministers: >. > >. That decree was on three different agendas and the same ministers had to block it each time".

CUSTOMS "The corruption in the customs is the same. There haven’t been any significant changes. The only customs-house that appears to have applied the law is Constanta-South… In the other customs, the contraband is blossoming!"

WARNING "If these Government members don’t remember their promises from the electoral campaign, I ask them to go back to the schedule. It is still not too late, the quick sands of corruption didn’t catch them yet and I ask them to clean immediately the areas of health, energy, customs and frontier police, to privatize fairly the 8% shares from Petrom. (…) I said > and it seemed like I took the oxygen out of some people’s air. Look, the President says there is the temptation and the possibility that some ministers could enter under the influence of several structures... But the fact that nothing really changed for the health system, for the energy or for the customs, and there is a "dirty" decree that is to be approved for Petrom, proves I am right, it proves there is a difference between the Government’s attitude and our words in the electoral campaign (…)

We cannot create environment for better because there are these bottomless bags because of which we accused the SDP (Social Democratic Party) of putting the public money into. We don’t do anything to regulate them, to put them under control and we seem to like it this way, but I am frightened of this idea, which means we change the accounts of the ones before us, we give them another accounts: >"

THE RELATION WITH TARICEANU "I don’t want to make it a secret out the fact that, as it is very obvious, in the last period of time, we have different opinions. (…) He will still have my full support. The problem is that he would have to choose whether he wants to be partner of the President of Romania or with groups from outside the Government and the parties. (…) I am a dependable politician and I want a partnership with the Prime Minister; I don’t want the Prime Minister to be the partner of some outside groups, I want him to be my partner and not the one of some people that didn’t win the power in a legal way. This is all."

"OCCULT" FORCES "The decision of giving up on the before-term elections was unfortunately taken outside the party and was given to the Alliance like a pill. There won’t be any note from the SRI but it is a small world we are living and I am a part of it. I know about the meeting before the canceling with an important businessperson, with a very important journalist and with a very important representative of a cigarette trust, which took place two days after the meeting between the journalist and the businessperson. (…) Even though the respective journalist says there are interest groups that influence the political decisions in all the countries of the world, I have only one answer to his campaign: yes, there are, but the mob groups aren’t among them."

"In the day in which the Prosecutor’s Office was investigating a certain person, a journalist who I welcomed for a long time, took the liberty of calling and threatening. Therefore, we got to the point in which a journalist takes the liberty of calling the Romanian President (the mob is the one that reacts) and threaten: I will use all the newspapers I control to finish you, to…."

"THE SUSPECTS" Who are those people that the President refers to as being the ones that influenced the Governmental decision? Who is that person that should receive all the 8% from Petrom? Is it Liviu Luca? Who is the businessperson that seems to have convinced Prime Minister Tariceanu to give up on the before-term elections? The same Luca? The famous Sorin Ovidiu Vantu? The politicians also speak of the meeting that Traian Basescu talked about as being attended by Peter Imre, the representative of the "cigarette trust", which the President was talking about. Contacted by Jurnalul National, Imre’s only answer was "No Comment". The journalist might be the Ziua director, Sorin Rosca Stanescu. Not long ago a close friend of the President, during several TV shows, he used to brag about the exclusive information regarding the hostages’ crisis received from the President directly. When businessperson Dinu Patriciu was arrested, Rosca came up front and publicly accused Basescu of investigating the Patriciu case.

REACTION Prime Minister’s position appeared a few hours later in the form of a public statement at the Victoria Palace. He emphasized "there is no corruption in the Government." Then, he referred to all the accusations from the President, explaining the real situation of the "interest groups". He said that they have to be understood as long as they do not affect the national interest and security and as long as they are legal. "There hasn’t been any decision in the Government to favor these groups", Tariceanu said. He referred to the Petrom decree with the same precision: "The Government didn’t take any decision and will obey the laws in the favor of the Petrom employees". As for the decision of giving up on the before-term elections, he said it was a "tough decision", but it is in accordance to the real situation of Romania, after the floods. In the end, the Prime Minister said there is a partnership between the President and the Government, which has the same agenda, but there might be some different opinions as well. (Dan Constantin)

HOW TO "EAT" THE MONEY FROM HEALTH "What did we do for the health structures? We took over the power. We saw it was quite nice to have the power and the system to have debts all the time, with us not knowing where the money went, with the medications being more expensive, with the health service not being clear, with a solid unregulated system. We liked it and we said: >. We blamed the SDP for the situation in the health system, and now we pretend to change it. We are talking of a leap from 800 million US dollars for the health system to 4 billions, without the improvement of the quality of the health services. This means the system eats this resource and it illegally goes to areas were it shouldn’t be", Basescu said, referring to the health system led by Minister Mircea Cinteza.

THE LIBERALIZATION OF ENERGY "The liberalization of the energy market was done partially, approximately 5% during the SDP Government. We were forced to liberalize the energy by the end of 2006; we suddenly had to hurry and liberalize 83% of the market this year, taking into account this is an unsuitable system for the allocation of the energy. There are the clever guys that take from the hydro and sell electrical current to certain clients, and the unlucky guys that use only thermo, which is a lot more expensive in the most cases. (…) We accuse Dan Ioan Popescu of doing tricks with Hydro, but we get to the conclusion we like them. We don’t change anything, but, before clearly regulating the price of the energy from the Hydro system to the benefactors, we open the market one year in advance. (…)"