February 25, 2021 UPDATE

A roundup of domestic and international news

Newsroom, 25.02.2021, 20:00

COVID-19 ROMANIA – The Covid-19
vaccination campaign continues in Romania. 1.5 million doses have been used so
far to vaccinate some 850 thousand people, mostly with Pfizer/BioNTech. The
Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines have also been administered across the
country. The vaccination of education employees, through school inspectorates,
began on Wednesday in Bucharest and most counties. The whole procedure will
take until March 10 for the first dose of vaccine, and authorities estimate
that 60,000 people will be immunized during this period. So far, more than
42,000 teachers have already been vaccinated. On the other hand, almost 4,000
new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been reported today,
following about 37,000 tests run nationwide. In total, since the beginning of
the pandemic in Romania, over 790,000 cases have been registered, and about 90%
of the patients have been cured. The total number of deaths has exceeded 20
thousand.

COVID-19 IN THE WORLD – The European
Parliament’s Transport and Tourism Committee (TRAN) on Thursday passed a
resolution calling for the issuance of vaccination certificates for EU citizens.
The document highlights a need for a new EU strategy on a safe, clean and more
sustainable tourism. MEPs want an EU-wide vaccination certificate, that could
become a viable alternative to PCR tests and quarantine measures, once there is
sufficient evidence vaccinated people don’t pass on the virus. Restrictions imposed to stop the spread of
coronavirus infection have caused deep recessions in 2020 in the European
Union, hitting in particular the south of the continent. In the world,
according to worldometers, at least 113 million people have been infected with
the new coronavirus so far. 2.5 million people have died and more than 88
million have been declared cured since the beginning of the pandemic a year
ago.

BUDGETS – The state and
social security draft budgets have reached Romania’s Parliament. Coalition
leaders agreed the MPs representing the three parties will not file amendments
and will endorse the bills as they were submitted by the Executive. From the
opposition, the Social Democratic Party criticizes this year’s austerity budget
and has prepared lots of amendments. However, there is little chance for
amendments to be accepted that will substantially change the two bills, because
Parliament has already voted on the Law regarding the ceilings that set the
financial constrains for the two budgets. This year, the deficit cannot exceed
7.16% of the GDP, and personnel costs will have to stay below 9.8%. Most
ministries have been allotted a higher budget than in 2020, so the idea of an
austerity budget is out of the question, Finance Minister Alexandru Nazare said
on Tuesday. The plenary vote on the two draft budgets is scheduled for next
Tuesday.

HOSPITALITY – The principle of
‘first come, first served’ has been removed from the Government Emergency
Ordinance on support measures for HoReCa companies, the Minister of Economy,
Entrepreneurship and Tourism, Claudiu Năsui, said on Thursday. He has stressed
that, following the removal of this principle, all eligible applicants,
regardless of when they applied, will receive funding. The Minister of Economy
has also stated that this aid scheme is based on a budget of one billion lei
(approx. 200 million euros) and benefits the HoReCa sector in the form of
grants in the amount of 20% of the calculation base, without exceeding 800,000
euro per enterprise. HoReCa entrepreneurs have repeatedly called for the
situation of restaurants to stop being decided depending on the COVID incidence
rate. They recalled that the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy.

EUROPOL – The EUROPOL on
Thursday announced that, as a result of searches conducted in France, Romania
and the Republic of Moldova, law enforcement officers in these countries
arrested 38 people suspected of being part of a human trafficking network
exploiting people on construction sites. According to the EUROPOL’s website,
the criminal network smuggled and registered Moldovan workers in France with
fake IDs, while keeping their real passports as guarantees. An investigation by the French Border Police as part
of the National Police, the Romanian Police and the Moldovan Police, supported
by Europol and Eurojust, led officers to dismantle an organized crime group
involved in migrant smuggling, human trafficking for labor exploitation,
document fraud, social benefit fraud and money laundering. The
investigation into the criminal network started in 2018 when officers in France
intercepted a van transporting ten irregular migrants. They were Moldovan
nationals and a number of them had counterfeit Romanian identity cards. The
criminal group, organized by a Romanian national living in France, smuggled at
least 40 Moldovan nationals to exploit them in the construction business in
France. This activity was extremely lucrative, with illegal profits estimated
at almost €14 million. Large construction and
renovation companies were also involved in the criminal scheme. The suspects
laundered the criminal assets through eight shell companies, most of them based
in France.

SCHOLARSHIPS – Starting next year, Romania will be
granting 100 scholarships to young students from Belarus eager to enroll in
higher education institutions in Romania. The scholarships will address BA, MA
or doctoral school programmes with teaching in Romania or an
internationally-spoken language. This initiative allows Belarusian students,
including those expelled for political reasons or who consider themselves
threatened by Minsk authorities, to further their studies in prestigious universities
in Romania. Through this decision Romania wants to contribute to supporting the
efforts of Belarusian civil society, thus meeting national and European foreign
policy goals, the Foreign Ministry reports. (M.I. & V.P.)