Complicated Parliament Agenda
A bill on the abuse of office and special pensions is high on the agenda of the Chamber of Deputies in Bucharest
Roxana Vasile, 03.04.2023, 14:00
Parliament in Bucharest is in for more heated debates this
week after two draft laws, on the abuse of office and special pensions – have
been submitted for debates and voting.
Voting on the two bills has become predictable in principle, thanks
to the comfortable majority the ruling PNL-PSD-UDMR coalition is presently enjoying.
The Chamber of Deputies is a decision making forum regarding these two bills.
The draft law on the abuse of office is to be endorsed
within a ceiling of 9,000 lei, (18 hundred Euros) above which the deed is to be
criminalized and punishable with jail sentences for public employees- PSD
leader Marcel Ciolacu says. He believes that Justice Minister Cătălin Predoiu
should have assumed the aforementioned value limit as early as the draft’s
initial form, and that should have prevented the first endorsement at a higher
ceiling of 250 thousand lei.
Marcel Ciolacu: ʺI am firmly
convinced together with my colleagues from the PSD PNL and UDMR that this law
will get promulgated with the ceiling of 18 hundred Euros, as proposed by the Justice
Minister.
However, the opposition USR has lashed out at the form
endorsed by the PSD, PNL, UDMR senators.
Stelian Ion: The
Constitutional Court’s decision imposed a ceiling, which was common sense,
reasonable at the level of the minimum wages.
Also in spite of the oppositions’ protests, a draft on
reforming the special pensions paid to state employees has made it to the
Chamber of Deputies.
Under the new amendments backed by the ruling
coalition, no special pension has to exceed the incomes before the person’s
retirement. Accumulated pension plans have been banned and a tax of maximum 15%
has been introduced for the non-contribution period. Unsatisfactory, says the
opposition, which has called for the introduction of the contribution system
for all pensions irrespective of the activity domain. 200 thousand people are
presently benefitting from special pensions, most of them former employees of
the country’s defence and public order structures. However, the former magistrates, judges and
prosecutors are presently enjoying the biggest special pensions, which can go
up to 36 hundred Euros, ten times above a regular pension. Reforming the
country’s pension system is a request provided by the National Plan of Recovery
and Resilience and we recall that the approval of roughly 3 billion dollars worth
of EU funds hinges on this plan.
Other bills on the Parliament agenda in Bucharest
might be the new laws on education, based on Romanian president Klaus Iohannis’
project entitled Educated Romania’. The
law is aimed at curbing school dropout and functional illiteracy, at placing
the student at the center of the country’s educational process, at the same
time backing the European cooperation of universities in Romania. The
opposition has criticized the draft laws as faulty and prone to cause
imbalances.
(bill)
