Bogdan Tudorache

The Economic and Social Council (CES) endorsed on Friday the ordinance that passes some assets of state energy companies, especially CE Hunedoara, to the Ministry of Energy, in order to extinguish tax debts.

“The approval by the CES was delayed because it didn’t have all the necessary stamps. Then there have been discussions with the European Commission for months, and it has approved the ordinance in its current form. It had to be approved yesterday because the parliamentary holiday starts and could not be delayed for another two months,” Silvia Vlăsceanu, vice president of CES, told energynomics.ro.

In this case, the order was issued especially for CE Hunedoara, but “it could also apply to the Electrocentrale,” Vlăsceanu said.

The government approved on Thursday the ordinance that practically deletes the debts of state-owned companies with financial problems, such as CE Hunedoara, government officials told energynomics.ro. The ordinance, which has long been on the agenda of the Economic and Social Council (CES), provides for the transfer of assets to the Ministry of Energy for the debts to the budget.

Contact energynomics.ro, CES officials said the institution did not manage to give its opinion on the ordinance. “Tomorrow (Friday – e.n.) will take place the CES plenum to approve the Ordinance”, a CES official told us. Moreover, the ordinance in question was not officially on the agenda published on the Executive’s website for Thursday.

The Ordinance provides for the extinction of the tax receivables administered by the Ministry of Finance through the ANAF, through the transfer of the companies in question to the public property of the state and the administration of the Ministry of Energy. One of the companies is the Hunedoara Energy Complex, which at the end of last year had debts to the state budget of about 268 million lei, and the list includes Electrocentrale Bucharest.

“At Electrocentrale can not be applied in practice, the ordinance mainly targeted Hunedoara, or other state-owned companies with large debts to the budget. Electrocentrale has only about 50% of the liabilities to the state. In addition, I do not see how it could be applied in the case of Electrocentrale,” an energy official close to the ELCEN-RADET situation told energynomics.ro.

The government has previously erased CE Hunedoara’s debts, which has attracted a European Commission investigation that decided that CEH has received illegal state aid and it has to reimburse about 60 million euro to the budget.

Fact is that it is not very clear how the ordinance will be applied, as it involves the concession of some assets in a form to be determined later. “This emergency ordinance creates the general framework that will allow the Ministry of Finance, through ANAF, to extract from the energy system all the efficient assets, those that actually produce energy without generating losses, then offer them through a concession through a procedure which will be established later, so that at the end of the whole process we’ll have some companies and some energy assets that will actually be important for the national energy system, both technically, namely supporting permanently the national energy system, regardless of season, the but also by the way they will no longer create losses for the entire economy and, moreover, without making losses, will allow their upgrading and modernization, and here I am referring also to the greening of the entire system,” said the prime minister’s advisor, Florin Ciocănelea, in a press conference of the government.