May 11, 2015

A roundup of domestic and international news.

Newsroom, 11.05.2015, 12:00

Macedonian police has announced that the operation
launched on Saturday against an armed
group believed to be made up of Albanians,
in the northern town of Kumanovo, at the border with Kosovo, has ended.
22 people have been reported dead. Police sources said members of the armed
group have illegally entered Macedonia from a neighbouring country and were
planning a terrorist attack on the state institutions.

East European countries must trim their debt to bring
economic growth and investment above levels before the global financial crisis,
the International Monetary Fund said, Bloomberg reports. Capital inflows and
easy access to loans fuelled economic growth of more than 5 percent a year in
Eastern Europe before the crisis that unfolded in 2008. Since then, bad loans
have shot up and weigh on bank and company balance sheets, the IMF said. The
IMF urged steps to tackle non-performing loans, relax labour markets and
improve the business environment. Bulgaria, Croatia and Ukraine need the most
debt adjustment, with companies in Latvia and Slovenia also at risk. Growth in
the Baltic countries and the European Union’s eastern nations will average 2.6
percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2016, the IMF predicts. The Balkan region
will expand 1.9 percent in 2015 and 2.4 percent the following year, it said. As
far as Romania is concerned, the Fund counts on a 2.7% increase this year and a
2.9% increase in 2016.

The
new Forestry Code has been submitted to the Chamber of Deputies for debate, at
the request of president Klaus Iohannis. According to the head of state, the
document contains some provisions that might limit
the activity of entrepreneurs and companies and might also make the sector less
competitive. Two weeks ago, the Senate rejected the changes requested by
the president and voted the initial version of the law, but it is up to the
Chamber of Deputies to decide on it. The government
has notified the National Anti-Corruption Directorate on at least 50 possible
acts of corruption in the forestry field, committed by people who brought a
significant prejudice to the forest fund and the state institutions. More on
this, after the news.

Eurozone
finance ministers are meeting in Brussels today to continue negotiations on a
deal to release a portion of billions of bailout funds. Ministers in Athens say
they will honour the 750million euros to the IMF due on Tuesday. Greece has
until the end of June to agree to a new reform deal with its creditors. The
country’s public debt stands at around 320 million euros, the equivalent of
175% of the country’s GDP.

A regional summit on cyber security takes place in
Romania’s capital city Bucharest between May 11 and 13. Romania’s Ministry for
Information Society and the U.S. Department of Commerce are the organizers.
Representatives of 17 countries in Central and Eastern Europe will attend the
summit and present their cyber security policies. The participants will also
talk about cyber threats and vulnerabilities and about regional and
international cooperation.

Conservative Andrzej Duda, aged 42, surprisingly won the first round of the
presidential elections in Poland on Sunday, with 34.8% of the votes, an exit
poll indicated. President
Bronislaw Komorowski, aged 62,an
independent allied with the centre-right Civic Platform, which has been in
government since 2007, got 32.2% of the votes. Neither candidate will gain the 50% needed to win
outright so a second round of voting will be held on May 24th.

The Romanian Foreign Ministry asked the Ukrainian
Ambassador in Bucharest for clarifications, after the former Moldovan prime
minister, Mircea Druc, who also has Romanian citizenship, was denied access to
Ukraine. Druc was to attend, on Sunday, several cultural events in Cernauti,
Ukraine. According to the Romanian foreign Ministry, the Ukrainian authorities’
decision comes against the Romanian -Ukrainian current relationship and has
reminded that Romania was the first community state to have ratified Ukraine’s
association agreement with the EU.