Presidential contender of the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) George Simion, attending on Wednesday the Romanian Business Leaders Summit, said that „it’s a good idea” for the state to have control over the country’s natural resources, soil and subsoil riches and strategic companies.

He thus replied when asked during the meeting about „the protection of private property against the state’s intervention”, starting from the fact that some members of his entourage allegedly „aggressively promote ideas like 51% state ownership in any company.”

„A lot of misinformation has been spread in the last week, you may know that it’s me who is the main culprit for the depreciation of the national currency, for the plunges on the stock market, and not those who officially pushed the budget deficit to 9.3%. When we get the power levers in our hands, we will tell you what the reality is. I fear that it is even more dramatic than what we see. (…) In everything related to natural resources, the riches of the soil and subsoil and strategic companies, I think that yes, it is a good idea for the state to hold a controlling stake,” George Simion said.

In this context, he referred to the privatization of energy company Petrom.

„We see what OMV’s size was before the privatization of Petrom and we see where it stands today. OMV, a company the Austrian state has multiple interests in – and if it were only the Austrian state, but there are other states and other interests at play there. This doesn’t mean that we do not want to cooperate with OMV and the other companies that have brought prosperity to Romania,” Simion also declared.

On a different note, he emphasized that economic freedom is one of the pillars of AUR’s political program, professing his belief in private initiative and in reducing the state’s abusive power to intervene in the private sector.

AGERPRES