President Basescu: Romania must be willing to back steel, aluminium and fertilizers industries
Romania must be willing to back the important industries such as steel-making, aluminium-making and the fertilizers industry in the face of the competition based on fuel dumping prices, given that job creation is genuine gold at times of crisis, Romanian President Traian Basescu says.
In remarks made at the Jubilee Gala of the National Association of Romanian Exporters and Importers (ANEIR) on Monday, Basescu said: 'Gold is represented by the capability to create or maintain jobs, which bring production and revenues to the state budget, not the Rosia Montana gold. We should examine the support we could render the steel, aluminium and fertilizers industries and what the state can do to keep the production facilities working'.
The head of state spoke of the danger being faced by the Romanian fertilizers industry due to the dumping price of the fuel used by the Ukrainian and Russian competitors, a situation he said is similar to what happened in the 1990s, when the Romanian petro-chemical industry collapsed.
Basescu also spoke of the circumstances at Alro aluminium maker based in Slatina (southern Romania), where the talks had focused on the electricity deliveries from hydro-power producer Hidroelectrica, not on the companies that do business in energy by means of an office, Agerpres reports.
'A handful of bureaucrats used to establish how much energy Hidroelectrica will supply to Alro, without understanding that one needs contracts for bauxite from God know where, one needs transport contracts and needs to contract the processing too, if one wants to produce aluminium. I didn't see anybody attacking those who take the hydro-electric power and move it around an office. I heard the same phrase in 2007, namely there is no power contracted for 2012. Such information leaves one speechless. Nobody has ever said: Give Alro hydro-electric power, but (they said) give it 100 percent of what it needs', Basescu stressed.