January 29, 2024 UPDATE
Click here for a roundup of domestic and international news
Newsroom, 29.01.2024, 20:05
PUTIN The incumbent president
of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is running for another term in office in the
presidential election due over March 15 and 17, the Central Election Committee
has been quoted by the Russian and international press agencies as saying.
According to these sources, both the supporters and opponents of the Kremlin
leader are expecting him to win a new 6-year mandate. If Putin completed this
mandate he could become the longest-lived Russian leader since the 18th
century. A former agent of the Soviet political police, the KGB, and former
Prime Minister, Putin got his first mandate as a president in 2000, a
designated successor of Russia’s post-soviet president Boris Yeltsin. In 2008,
when the Constitution didn’t allow him a third consecutive mandate, he formally
ceded his seat to Dmitri Medvedev, but he remained the strongman of the Russian
politics. Since the amended Constitution of 2012 Vladimir Putin has
uninterruptedly held the presidential seat of the Russian Federation. His
regime has been marked by the bloody reprisals against the breakaway
insurrection in Chechnya, the elimination of his domestic opposition, the
invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2022.
ORDINANCE Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on Monday announced
that he decided to extend for another 60 days the ordinance on capping trade
mark-ups in basic staple. Ciolacu says that according to data released by the
National Institute for Statistics, prices in December 2023 were 5.8% higher
than a year before, whereas before the introduction of the aforementioned
measure, the difference in prices between June 2023 and June 2022 was nearly
18%.
FUNDS The
Romanian Foreign Ministry on Monday voiced maximum concern about the latest
severe accusations regarding the alleged involvement of some of the personnel
of the UN Agency for Relief and Works for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the
Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7th. The Romanian
Ministry says that until the completion of the investigation into the
aforementioned allegations it will not release new procedures for volunteer
contributions to the UNRWA. The Ministry recalls that Romania has firmly
condemned the terrorist attacks on October 7th and voiced regret for
the victims, the hostages taken, and made an appeal for their release. We
recall that several countries, including the USA, Canada, the UK, Italy and Germany
have suspended their funding to the UNRWA until the completion of the
investigation into the aforementioned allegations.
IMF An
International Monetary Fund mission headed by Jan Kees Martijn arrived in
Bucharest on Monday to review the latest economic and financial developments.
This is a regular consultation based on Romania’s relation with the IMF, and it
comes 4 months after the previous visit. The IMF expects a budget deficit of 6%
of GDP and an economic growth rate of 2.3% this year. IMF experts also
recommend a number of additional reforms, and in the previous assessment visit
they mentioned the scrapping of the remaining exemptions, privileges and
loopholes, a more efficient VAT implementation, a reformed property tax system,
and the use of fiscal policies in order to promote efficient energy and the
clean energy transition. Romania has no ongoing agreements with the IMF at
present.
(bill)
