The way in which managers who run state-owned companies are determined has nothing to do with normality, with only two companies coming in and saying who is good to be a manager, said the Minister of Economy, Digitalization, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, Radu Miruță.

“There is that ordinance of corporate management, which involves hiring a head hunting firm, which makes a selection and establishes who the extraordinarily good managers are to lead these state-owned companies. How on earth does it happen that the result of these selection firms is a very short list of politicians? Out of the entire spectrum of people with management skills in Romania, this firm only produces politicians? This selection is a sham, it has nothing to do with normality,” said Radu Miruță, on Digi 24.

The Minister of Economy gave the example of some directors of state-owned companies who earn 53,000 lei per month, specifying that these are salaries of 50,000 lei without performance criteria. In addition, among the performance criteria for today’s contracts, it is mentioned that they should not be late for work. That is a check mark for the performance criterion.

“For situations where these people are directors there, following a “competition”, in quotation marks, from my point of view, I don’t have the possibility to do anything.” The only thing I can do is in two steps: to propose new performance criteria, and that’s what I’m doing these days, after which there will be an evaluation based on the new performance criteria”, said the Minister of Economy, according to Agerpres.

“But I realized that I have to control an instrument, that I’m stopping a procedure in vain if the companies that select the next ones are the same. There are two companies in the Ministry of Economy, only two, that come and say who is good to be a manager, I want there to be 20-25, that go to the market and find some people who come and tell me that maybe they want 10,000 euros, 15,000 euros. And I’m willing to receive this amount of money, if they really run a state company, in the interest of the Romanian state”, said Radu Miruță.

According to the Minister of Economy, Romanians do not feel anything from the wealth that the state has, because this wealth is filtered somewhere at the political level, failing to make itself felt in people’s lives.

”This is a paradox that I want to stop, no matter how much it upsets, because those who have to leave are not saints descended from the church’s iconography, but are people with many political connections at the highest level, who got there with the approval of the high political level,” the minister emphasized.

Article distributed with the support of  Schneider Electric