August 13, 2015 UPDATE
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România Internațional, 13.08.2015, 12:30
Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta and Valeriu Strelet, his counterpart from the neighboring Republic of Moldova, an ex-soviet country with a Romanian-speaking majority, had a phone talk on Thursday on bilateral priorities, particularly on energy infrastructure and transport, sources in Bucharest have announced. The two officials set a working meeting in Chisinau by the end of August. In another development, Strelet has said that voting for a government backed by a pro-European majority coalition has made the Republic of Moldova to come back from the brink, setting it on the right track. The statement by the country’s new Prime Minister comes after the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Thorbjorn Jagland has recently said the Republic of Moldova is on the brink and can become Europe’s next security crisis. According to Strelet, Chisinau has already started to make up for delays in the process of implementing the EU Association Agreement signed last year.
On June 30th this year, Romania’s foreign debt stood at 70.6 billion euros, nearly 7% lower as against the end of last year, the Central Bank announced on Thursday. The short-term external debt stood at 20.5 billion euros in the same period, 9% higher than the level registered on December 31st 2014. According to the same sources, foreign direct investment in Romania rose in the first six months of the year to 1.7 billion euros.
Turkey’s conservative Islamist Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday announced that talks on forging a government coalition ended in a stalemate adding that snap elections were very likely to be held. His Justice and Development Party, which has been leading Turkey for the last 13 years won the June the 7th election but lost absolute majority in Parliament. This political crisis comes after Turkey last week launched military operations on two fronts: against the Kurdish PKK rebels and the Syria-based Islamic State. In another move, the Pentagon announced that for the first time the USA had launched air strikes against the Islamic state from the airbase in Incirlik, Turkey against the positions held by the Islamic State in Syria.
During a phone call with his Russian counterpart Serghei Lavrov, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he was deeply worried about the latest string of attacks by pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, the US Department of State has announced. Kerry has called for the immediate cessation of fire and the implementation of the Minsk accord signed in mid-February. The EU and Kiev are blaming Russia and the pro-Russian rebels for undermining this agreement. 68 hundred people have been killed since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine in April last year.
Investors worried by the volatility on the Chinese market and the Greek crisis should look more to Eastern Europe and particularly to Romania, some economic analysts quoted by US television channel CNBC said. Central Europe and Romania are all looking a little bit pretty,” Charles Robertson, chief economist at emerging market-focused investment bank Renaissance Capital, told CNBC. According to Robertson, Romania is 2015s best-performing frontier market so far, with the Bucharest Stock Exchange up 9 percent on the year.
