“Romanian managers, culture and managerial experience make us pessimistic about the future. Even when we saw that the recovery is faster, we are still pessimistic, even if we see a recovery in a rather optimistic V. This K shaped recovery can be influenced by government policies, depending on the sectors that are supported. It’s a great time to start from scratch in any industry,” Andrei Cionca, CEO Impetum Group said during the “Post-pandemic recovery and the road to a new economy” debate.

“First of all, we are thinking about operational restructuring, and then about a financial restructuring of these state-owned companies. We still do not have a situation of state-owned companies that have restructured. We have a clear x-ray of how private managers have restructured. 20% of managers sent people into technical unemployment, 17% of managers who operated layoffs, 14% of them reduced salaries, 55% of companies went digital, 40% Romanian managers reduced salaries, and 20% of them they gave up office space as a measure of operational restructuring. In the next step of CONFIDEX we could conduct a similar study on state-owned companies, see what operational measures they have taken and see how they operate with the historical debts that have been created.

We chose 31 state-owned companies in difficulty (negative operating result in the last 3 years), they have a total loss of 31 billion lei / year, total debts of 11 billion and a turnover of 9 billion lei and 65,000 employees and their dependent families. Of all these, only 5 applied for financial restructuring measures available in Romanian legislation: 2 resorted to the provisions of OG6 to reduce debts to the state budget, 1 entered into a preventive arrangement and 2 took state aid for rescue or restructuring.

We have the successful example of ROMAERO, a company with state debts that no longer paid anything, and which through OG6 paid debts to the state budget of 77 million lei. From an over-indebted company, without operational activity, it was transformed into a bankable, functional company.”