Romania’s main opposition party, the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), announced on Monday, November 2, that it would file a simple motion against Finance Minister Alexandru Nazare, after Prime Minister Luca Niculescu failed to appear at the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies to present the country’s budget situation.
The motion aims to improve the Finance Ministry’s disclosure of budget execution data, AUR senator leader Petrișor Peiu announced at a press conference, cited by News.ro.
AUR MP Petrișor Peiu also said that minister Nazare would be invited to the Senate plenary session next Monday to explain the actual budget deficit.
Later the same day, Peiu explained that AUR would ask the Finance Ministry to publish budget execution figures quarterly under the ESA methodology, in addition to the national cash methodology. The ministry should also explain the differences between the figures reported under the two methodologies.
The senator said that the simple motion prepared by AUR against the Finance Ministry’s policy aimed to clarify the budgetary situation, but also had a political component, in the context of Prime Minister Luca Niculescu’s refusal to participate in a parliamentary debate.
The AUR senator leader believes that the information presented by the Finance Ministry is not detailed enough to explain the differences between the methods used to calculate the deficit.
Peiu requests that, alongside the budget execution figures published every three months, the authorities also present the deficit calculated under the European System of Accounts, known as the ESA methodology.
"The motion is for correcting a public policy or, more precisely, for making a public policy more transparent; it is not against anyone in particular," Petrișor Peiu told B1 TV.