Acting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan said on Wednesday that all political parties have long treated positions in state-owned companies as sinecures for party loyalists - a practice he argued 'can no longer continue' in the coming years.

Asked on broadcaster Antena 1 whether recent measures cut fairly from both taxpayers and those who 'suck' public money, Bolojan said spending reductions cannot be done overnight. 'You have to make cuts in the administration... some people have to leave, and reducing staff is not comfortable, especially where there is a political clientele,' he noted.

Bolojan added that the same applies to state-owned companies. 'When you have companies with huge losses and their directors are protected by contracts that reward them instead of pushing for performance, it's very hard to fix things from one day to the next.' Because he could not change their contracts, he said he conditioned government approval of their budgets on meeting clear performance criteria - including at Hidroelectrica, where he demanded targets for new storage capacity.

Bolojan also cited Metrorex and Otopeni Airport among the companies with serious management issues, while praising Romgaz's leadership in the context of negotiations to take over Azomures.

He acknowledged that all governing parties have placed their own people in state companies, but said that the PSD 'excelled' at it. 'As long as we treated these positions as places to plant party people. (...) All parties have done this. But there is one formation where, wherever there's a problem, we see a high density of cronies. This disease is called pesedism - the PSD habit of planting loyalists everywhere possible, extracting rents... We cannot continue down this path in the coming years,' Bolojan concluded. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Daniel Florea; EN - writing by: Simona Klodnischi)