“We negotiated this rate with the [Ministry of] Finance for four months. This is the best option. We already took out the loan, €187.5 million, with grace period until 2011, and six years to reimburse. This is indeed the largest syndicated loan this year. It is only natural that it be CNADNR that contracted this, not a match factory,” Berceanu told Business Standard yesterday.
CNADNR’s General Manager, Dorina Tiron, said that the road company had no other option but to access a loan, due to insufficient funds received from the state budget this year. “Following the revision, we received a little over RON 400 million from the state budget, considering that road repair and maintenance expenses amount to RON 600 million annually,” Tiron indicated.
According to a calculation by Business Standard, if the state had borrowed the money at the rates applied for the “First Home” program, it would have saved over €5.5 mln annually.
Tiron added that €100 mln of the €187.5 mln loan will be used to refinance a loan taken out in 2005, from BCR. “We had to repay the old loan to get a new one.” The General Manager did not put forward any figures on funds the road company should receive from the road tax included in the price of fuel or the vignettes that car owners must buy every year. According to data on CNADNR’s Web site, the vignettes alone should generate revenues in excess of RON 800 mln annually, the lei equivalent of the recent loan.
