September 25, 2015 UPDATE

A roundup of the main stories in Romania today

Newsroom, 25.09.2015, 12:15

Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis, who is on
an official visit to the US, will meet representatives of the Romanian
community in New York on Saturday. On Friday, he attended the opening of a UN
summit seeking to define a post-2015 development agenda and had talks with the
president of the UN General Assembly
Mogens Lykketoft. During his trip to the US, which comes to an end on the 29th
of September, Klaus Iohannis is also due to meet US Vice President Joe Biden to
discuss the refugee crisis in Europe and the fight against terrorism.

The Romanian undersecretary for European
affairs George Ciamba said that in the investigations it has carried out so
far, Romania has found no evidence of CIA detention centres on its territory or
that Romanian airports were used by the US secret services for the transport or
detention of terrorism suspects. The Romanian official made these statements at
a meeting in Bucharest with a European Parliament delegation carrying out an
investigation to this effect in Romania. Ciamba also said that the General
Prosecutor’s office is at this time running a judicial investigation into the
matter. The existence of CIA detention centres was also the subject of an
earlier inquiry by the European Parliament in 2006.

The former head of the organised crime and
terrorism directorate Alina Bica and the former head of the Tax Administration
Agency Serban Pop were prosecuted on Friday. The two are suspected of receiving
230,000 euros in bribe from a businessman. Alina Bica also faces trial in two
other corruption cases.

Romania’s agreement
with the International Monetary Fund, which was suspended last summer, expires
on Saturday. Experts expect a picture of the future relations between the two
sides to become clearer in the coming period. The revision of Romania’s current
agreement with its international creditors worth 4 billion euros was blocked in
June 2014 over the lack of an agreement on the government’s fiscal plans. In
the first part of 2015, the Romanian authorities tried to adopt comprehensive
tax cuts by means of a new tax code, but the representative of the
international financial institutions as well as Romania’s Tax Council and the
National Bank criticised the move. This month, the finance minister Eugen
Teodorovici said Romania was planning to start talks with its international
creditors about a new assistance programme starting in 2016. In the minister’s
opinion, this agreement is necessary in order to protect Romania’s financial
sector against the shocks on the market.

The Romanian
Automobile Registry on Friday requested the representative office in Romania of
the German group Volkswagen to present it with a list of cars equipped with
devices to cheat pollution tests. This follows a European Commission call on
the 28 EU member states to look into the diesel vehicles made by Volkswagen.
The German car maker is accused of cheating US pollution tests by equipping its
cars with software designed to reduce emissions from the vehicles when being
tested.

Romania could
technically adopt the European single currency in 2022 or 2023, but this will
ultimately be a political decision, said the vice-governor of Romania’s Central
Bank Bogdan Olteanu. He added that Romania was one of the few countries from
outside the euro zone to look at the adoption of the euro with optimism.
Previously, the Central Bank and the Government spoke of 2019 as the deadline
for the adoption of the European single currency.

The United States Trade and
Development Agency will grant Romanian company Transgaz a non-reimbursable loan
of 956,000 dollars for a project to extend its pipeline network. The financing
agreement was signed in Bucharest by the US ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm
and the Transgaz general manager Petru Ioan Vaduva. The money will be used to
carry out a feasibility study on the Romanian section of the
Bulgaria-Romania-Hungary-Austria gas pipeline and the Tuzla-Podisor pipeline in
south-eastern Romania.

World no. 2 Simona Halep
will play straight into the second round of the WTA tournament in Wuhan, China,
against the winner of the match between Anastasia
Pavlyucenkova and Svetlana Kuznetsova. The Romanian player is seeded first in
this tournament worth 2,212,250 dollars in prize money. Three other Romanian
players are in the competition: Irina Begu faces Zarina Dias, Monica Niculescu
plays against Fangzhou Liu, while Alexandra Dulgheru will be facing Ana
Ivanovic in the first round.