EDITORIAL - EU doesn't care about Romanian motorways

The plans for infrastructure works recently presented by the Ministry of Transport show that the EU doesn’t care about Romanian motorways. Minister Radu Berceanu unveiled the EU financed motorways lie: only 1.5 billion Euros will come from the deep pockets in Bruxelles to finance roads costing 12.8 billion Euros. Obviously, to build the planned 1,800 km of motorways, Romanian authorities must find alot of money elsewhere. The same story applies to investments in other ways of transport, since high ranked officials complain that local businessmen expect too much from the state in the infrastructure field.
Still, many voices from Bruxelles state almost every day that Romania will get tens of billions of Euro to update its infratructure in the next years and we’d better spend it wisely. But where do the money go? One might say they enter the ground, since they don’t seem to enter the roads. The answers aren’t so hard to find. On one hand there’s the fact that we don’t have projects for the like of EU officials. Such is the case with the motorway linking Sibiu to Pitesti: EU doesn’t even want to hear about paying for it. On the other hand, alot of money might be wasted on fruitless projects - twinning programmes, technical consulting services or other scholarly briefings.