The Minister of Finance, Natalia Gavriliță, said that if state-owned enterprises engage in corruption schemes or do not spend public procurement funds judiciously, then these amounts of money do not reach the state budget. According to the minister, the elimination of these schemes will increase revenues, yet the process is time consuming, because it involves the revision of contracts, government decisions and laws.
"We, so that citizens understand, when we talk about ‘schemes’, we talk about the embezzlement of public money. That is, someone makes decisions, signs contracts and makes public procurement acquisitions that are clearly against the public interest and the budget interest and include multiple elements that need to be understood. I can offer ‘Chisinau Arena’, as an example, because Minister Brînzan has already talked about this so-called ‘public-private partnership’, which implies a contract that was concluded at the expense of the state, where the partnership, in fact, consists of public spending and private income,” said Natalia Gavriliță in an interview with Radio Free Europe.
According to the minister, it takes some time to read the contracts, understand the conditions, understand how the decisions were made, how is the budget affected and what can be done to fix things. In some cases, says the minister, large international companies were involved. "We must try to renegotiate or see what can be done so as to not affect the economic agents who acted within the normative framework, but where state authorities made detrimental decisions for the citizens,” said the minister.
Natalia Gavriliță added that funding for the "Prima Casa" (First House) program, initiated by the former government, was not cut. The figures are being adjusted according to the realities of the first half of the year. According to her, though the program was funded, there was a limited number of requests and only a small part of the expected funding was spent. The conditions of the program remain unchanged and funding is not cut. "Same approach is applied to ‘Drumuri Bune’ (Good Roads), where we have neither feasibility studies nor concluded contracts, where we know that we will not spend the money until the end of the year, thus we modify it so we can use these funds for other purposes", explains the finance minister.
