The government will adopt a normative act that will create a guarantee mechanism for working capital and investments and for large companies that cannot access SMEs Invest, Prime Minister Ludovic Orban said on Monday.

The Prime Minister announced that a state aid scheme for which the Government has received the support of the European Commission will soon become operational, “especially for large electricity consumers, by practically reducing the price of electricity, by reducing the amount of CO2 certificates by up to 20% “.

“We are thinking of another measure, to reduce the cogeneration tax, so as to generate energy supply conditions. (…) At present, Romanian companies buy at higher prices than the prices of the tariffs at which the gas and power are bought in many EU countries. Especially the companies that have a significant cost of electricity or natural gas in their cost structure… and we have many companies in the Romanian economy that consume electricity and gas and have a high cost structure, whose competitiveness was diminished internationally. Here, we will have to think of mechanisms to allow companies to access, at least at the average European price, natural gas and electricity,” he added, according to Agerpres.

“I think we can take advantage of an international economic situation in which Romania can be an attractive target for important relocations of production capacity, which will be relocated from certain countries and we are ready to provide the best possible conditions to be able to attract them. We already have favorable signals in this regard and I think it can be an important engine of growth,” he said.

”We are also preparing some measures. After the SME Invest model, we will adopt a normative act that will create a mechanism for guarantee for working capital and for investments, and for large companies that cannot access SMEs Invest, medium-sized companies, large companies.

This tool is very important, we have a lot of big companies that have kept their activity, we have a lot of big companies which, even if they suspended for a short period, resumed their activity, as in the case of Dacia, as in the case of Ford, as this is the case of many other companies, Pirelli, which resume their activity, after a short period of interruption,” Ludovic Orban said in a press conference at Victoria Palace.