Public consultation on new EC state aid schemes kicks off

Sever Avram, coordinator of the project Central-European Advocacy for Fair and Transparent Competition (CEFTAC), launched on Thursday at the French Institute in Bucharest an on-line public consultation on awareness and the implementation extent of the new State Aid schemes designed as part of the ongoing reform process initiated by the European Commission (EC). According to Avram, the purpose of the action is to propose for debate among business communities, experts, lawyers, academic circles and civil society representatives a set of observations, suggestions and recommendations that should make the starting point for the concomitant monitoring and pre-assessment of the overall performance and impact of competition supervisory and regulatory authorities.

In the coordinator’s opinion, raising awareness of the Romanian business environment of the culture of competition and European competitiveness is the more so important as ‘by signing the Treaty of Accession the European Union (EU), Romania has relinquished 75 pct of its sovereignty prerogatives to the EC and the Council of EU, and as far as stat aid is concerned, we stand 100 pct under EU jurisdiction, with any kind of aid requiring the approval of European commissioner for competition Neelie Kroes.’

These findings mainly rely on the experience of the Competition Council, but they are also related to the need to improve the expertise and performance of the other authorities with sectoral responsibilities: the National Energy Regulatory Authority, the National Regulatory Authority for Communications, the National Bank of Romania.

In principle, state aid schemes are already at the disposition of Romanian applicants, but official efforts to render them popular, raise awareness thereof and get concrete support for their activation still do not prompt the desired response among business people, managers, leaders of employers organizations, directors of research institutes, lawyers and consultants.

The public consultation issues are such as to facilitate a more clear inventory of the issues and reasons of discontent expressed by the business environment, especially with regard to procedures to access funds pinpointed in the new EC state aid schemes.

Through this consultation, the organizers lobby the representatives of public authorities to improve both their communication systems with potential beneficiaries and the concrete method to implement the relevant EC requirements Romania needs to observe as a EU member state.

The CEFTAC platform worked out a position document dedicated to the parallel assessment of the work style and role of market supervisory and regulatory authorities, that also incorporates a set of conclusions such as: expectations of the Competition Council (CC) to handle in a more balanced way the governmental decisions on the potential distortion of the competition regime and the possible distortion caused by the enforcement of CC decisions on the private sector; the regulatory authorities, particularly the CC, are expected to get more concretely involved in the popularization and explanation of the EC State Aid Plan of Action, inclusively of the implications on an efficient absorption of EU funds; the regulatory authorities, the CC in particular, need to proceed to the post-finalization grounded assessment of the outcomes of the enforcement of each particular law and ordinance; the CC is required to play a far more explicit and active role in analyzing the impact on the GDP of the policies for the stimulation of competitiveness and the new investments in various sectors.

The launch of the public consultation precedes the fourth edition of the Interactive Forum ‘European Competition and Competitiveness Day in Romania’ to be organized by CEFTAC on Nov. 6 at the Palace of Parliament, under the patronage of the EU French Presidency. AGERPRES