PM Citu: Salaries and bonuses in the public sector to stay at the December 20 level

 Prime Minister Florin Citu on Wednesday said that the salaries and bonuses of the central and local public administration staff, including of those holding public offices, will remain at the level of December 2020 next year. "Related to the ordinance initiated by the Ministry of Public Finance, this ordinance ensures a budget saving of almost 17.6 billion lei for 2021. In the first article: the salaries and bonuses of the central and local public administration staff are maintained, including of those holding public offices, at the level of December 2020. This means a budgetary impact of almost 12 billion lei," said Citu, after the Government meeting. He said that this decision was based on what happened with the salary law in recent years. "Here are several things I took into account. First of all, I said that the decision is based on what I saw happening with the Single Pay Law in the past three years, a law that was poorly enforced, a law that created discrepancies, although it promised to solve inequities in the public system, a law that was followed by many exceptions. In order to be able to correct these things, we needed to take a break and, by this ordinance, we are taking a break. Of course, we will be back with clarifications, in the next period," Citu also mentioned. The PM underscored that the government will not cut salaries in the public sector. "At the same time, we all know - and we have been saying this all year - that Romania, together with the global economy, is going through a difficult period. In 2020, as we said at the beginning, we did not touch anyone's income in the public sector and we also implemented measures to support the private sector, and even now - and again it must be very clear - we do not cut any salaries, nothing is happening with the incomes in the public sector, they will just remain at the level of December 2020, after we had an increase of 25 per cent last year and bonuses in several sectors. So this year, in order to correct these inequities and to keep ourselves within a budget deficit of 7 per cent, we had to make this decision," Citu added. AGERPRES (RO - author: Alina Novaceanu editor: Mihai Simionescu, EN - author: Cristina Zaharia)