One Chopper per Romanian - Or So It Seems

Romania’s Government plans to spend 165 million euros over four years to buy 100 choppers for the Ministry of Domestic Affairs. The draft government decision was posted on the official website of the ministry in line with the provisions of the law for transparency of governmental decision making and is open for public debate.

However, there are two things that do not add up.
The first one is the difference between the lavish expense which is being planned, on the one hand, and the current talk of budgetary constraints, on the other hand.
The second preposterous thing is that the arguments backing the spending of 165 million euros of public money are actually spread on one sheet of paper alone. The so called argument states only the total amount to be spent and not the number of choppers to be bought for it.

Further worrying is the wording of the draft document which states that "legal provisions for public acquisitions will be deployed."
All well and good, only that we well know that legal - that is as provided by existing laws - is to also award contracts with no prior bidding. The procedure was amply used by the previous Social Democrat Government to reward its political friends, and was fiercely criticized by the current government which now looks set to deploy the same means towards similar ends.

So, who could be the beneficiaries of these contracts? Sources in the government and the military told Jurnalul National that two are the likely winners: Sikorsky and Eurocopter.
One could further speculate that stating in euros the likely amount to be spent, the best chances lie with Eurocopter, which is also part of the EADS companies that sealed with the former SDP government a huge deal for securing the border control. That deal was fiercely contested by the current government which promised to scrap it once it assumed power, to later discover it could not. The only option for the liberal-democrat government is to amend the contract, and to this end, to grant another deal to one of EADS companies would help…

As a matter of fact, not long after the current government took office a delegation of Eurocopter visited the various ministries and along their congratulations presented the new team with a request for further government orders to be placed with the company’s Romanian subsidiary, IAR-Brasov, if further investments were to come from abroad.
Our request to the Ministry of Domestic Affairs to give the details of the orders which will amount to a total of 165 million euros were met with refusal; the claim was that the draft law was still open to public debate and as such no concrete details were yet part of it.

Jurnalul National made its own calculus on what could be bought for the same money:

82 blocks of flats, each 10 stories high, or;

1,650 individual housing units, or;

100 kilometers of highway, or;

350 sports halls, or;

140 new passenger train wagons, or;

300,000 sqm of prime land north of the capital city, Bucharest, or;

4.3 million lambs of 10 kilos each, for the meal on the Easter Sunday, or;

19,411 Logan cars, or;

825,000 coupons, of 200 euros each to young people in order to buy computers.

These are our questions to Mr. Blaga, the minister for domestic affairs:

How many choppers will the ministry buy for the 165 million euros?

What would they be used at?

Did any chopper maker come forward with an offer?

Did any bank come forward with proposals for financing the buy of choppers by the Romanian state? If yes, on which terms?

Did the ministry consider ordering the choppers to the domestic makers?

Which will be the final selection process: via public bidding, direct negotiation; buy from one source only, or other?