Capping energy prices was an extremely bad solution, claims USR deputy Cristina Prună, in a post on Facebook.
“Romanian industry closes on a conveyor belt. Thousands of jobs are being lost due to rising energy prices and the incompetence of the current PSD-PNL government. The much-touted solution to capping energy prices has left behind only chaos and despair. Alum Tulcea closes its doors and approximately 500 people lose their jobs. Alro plans to lay off another 1,200 employees from the Slatina plant, and other large companies in the industry are on the brink of despair,” says Cristina Prună.
“Now it is proven what I have always said: capping energy prices was actually an extremely bad solution. Why? Because it led to artificially inflated prices. And the only ones who bore the brunt of the exorbitant prices were the big industrial consumers. And that’s because they didn’t get any help to cover energy price increases under the pretext that separate solutions are being sought for them. They have been looking for solutions for 4 months, and they are closing their doors. The closing of the industry – this was the great ‘achievement’ of the capping scheme that exploded the prices through the economic engineering thought only by the PNL minister Virgil Popescu and the PSD,” the post states.
“Today, the price for the energy delivered in 2023 has crossed the threshold of 2,000 lei/MWh. So chaos rolls downhill, and the bill for the government will triple. This in the conditions where for 9 months of 2022 the state is going to pay 40 billion lei, although it does not help the industry at all.
Logical solutions would have existed and we proposed them in a bill as early as last October. Namely, that these companies no longer pay taxes to the state in the amount of half of the energy price increase, compared to July 2021. It would have been a measure that would have helped these companies enormously since last year and we would not have reached the threshold of their closing today. This is in addition to access to European funds for these companies to invest in energy efficiency, which will reduce their energy consumption. But the Minister of Energy is sleeping! And with it the 13 billion euros, European money, from the Modernization fund. The created disaster will unfortunately remain in the long term and it will not be easily repaired,” concluded the USR deputy.
