July 31, 2013
Click here for a round-up of news from Romania.
Corina Cristea, 31.07.2013, 15:00
At the end of a two-week visit to Bucharest, the international creditors’ mission has announced it agreed upon a new precautionary loan with Romania. Worth 4 billion Euros, the agreement will equally be granted by the IMF and the EC. The agreement will be discussed by the IMF board in autumn, the IMF chief negotiator for Romania, Andrea Schaecher, has announced, also saying that Romania’s economic growth forecast has been revised upwards, to 2%. According to the Romanian authorities, the privatization of some state-owned companies will be included among the conditions in the new agreement. The previous agreement, also a precautionary one, was successfully completed by Romania last month.
The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile has called on prosecutors to start criminal investigation against a former head of a communist prison, whom they accuse of murders and torture. The institute claims that at least 5 political detainees were killed in the detention center in Ramnicu-Sarat (in the east), while Alexandru Visinescu (88 years old) was in charge of the prison, between 1956 and 1963. The institute says that, in this case, it has made available to prosecutors hundreds of archive documents, which come to prove Visienscu’s guilt. According to official data, between 1945 and 1989, over 600 thousand people were sentenced to prison in Romania for political reasons. However, the magnitude of their suffering started being exposed only in recent years.
The unemployment rate in Romania amounted to 7.6% in June, that is 0.5% higher than in the same period of 2012, data made public by the National Institute of Statistics show. According to the aforementioned institute, the unemployment rate among men exceeds by 0.5 % the unemployment rate among women. The number of unemployed people in the 15 to 74 year age bracket stood at 736,000 people in June 2013.
The EU hails the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and supports a peace process between the parties. This statement was made on Wednesday by Dalia Grybauskaite, the president of Lithuania, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, at the end of talks with her Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, who was on an official visit to Vilnius. The direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were resumed Monday night in Washington, after a 3-year deadlock in the peace process. The US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the two parties will meet again in two weeks in the Middle East, in order for a final agreement to be reached in the coming 9 months.
