The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oana Toiu, stated that she will respect the commitment to reduce personnel expenses by 10%, but reducing the salaries of Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) employees is not „realistically possible” because the salary scale is „significantly” below the average of the scales of other ministries.

„The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has undertaken to support the objectives stated by the Prime Minister, namely the reduction in budgetary expenditures. As for the reduction of salaries of employees in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this is not realistically possible and I invite you to see the salary scale, it is public. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a salary scale significantly below the average of the salary scales of other ministries, but we have other instruments with which we want to respect this commitment to reduce 10% of personnel expenses and we will come up with this plan”, Toiu stated, on Wednesday, in Parliament.

Referring to the possible merger of the Romanian Diplomatic Institute with other institutions, Toiu said: „The Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not support the bill in Parliament, which mixes in the same place institutions that belong to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and are created to train and educate diplomats and other institutions that have no connection to this field, because, although merging several institutions may look good mathematically, when you completely mix different fields of activity and missions and teams with different training, it is most likely that none of them will be able to do their job well”.

She explained that the possibility will be analyzed „to reduce costs, especially for services that they may have in common, whether we are talking about legal, administrative, accounting services and we will present these proposals by the end of the year”. AGERPRES