Today, June 11, 2004, the President of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANRC), Ion Smeeianu, and the ANRC Vice-president, Alexandrina Hirtan, held a press conference in order to reaffirm the independence of ANRC and eliminate the misunderstandings caused by the coverage in the Romanian media of insufficiently explained information from the World Bank Report “Reforming Infrastructure – Privatization, Regulation and Competition”.
“The World Bank Report is not intended to be a description of the present situation, it only gives examples of past situations in order to support its conclusions, which we consider to be true: independent regulation, based on solid economic principles, can lead to better functioning of the public utilities”, stated Ion Smeeianu.
Smeeianu also said that the examples given by the World Bank study with regard to the communications regulation in Romania refer to the situation as it was in 2000 and earlier, their source being documents published 4 years ago. “Anyone can notice this after a careful analysis of the documents the data was extracted from. In order to support the conclusions regarding the communications sector, the present report on the reforming of infrastructure describes the regulatory activity in our country, in its unfortunate state as of year 2000”, said the ANRC President. He added that on the same page as the reference to Romania there are also descriptions of the state of facts in Latvia in 1999, Brazil in 2000 and Argentina in 1996.
Also, the ANRC President declared that he talked earlier today with the representative of the World Bank in Romania, who assured him that the position of the World Bank in relation to the current status of the regulatory activity in the field of Romanian communications is the one comprised in the report of the institution of March 2004, which states that: “In assessing the current structure it should be recognized that what is critical to the regulatory function is that the regulator can perform its functions independently from the Ministry and from the system operators, and has financial autonomy. Romania has largely achieved this status, and has received international recognition of this achievement.”
ANRC Vice-president, Alexandrina Hirtan highlighted the fact that the information conveyed by the press refer to an old state of affairs, as it made reference to the National Agency for Communications and Information (ANCI), institution which no longer exists since January 2001, as well as to a situation where the responsibility for overseeing telecommunication prices were shared by ANCI, the Competition Office, the Cabinet and the Competition Council. “At present, the National Regulatory Authority for Communications is the only institution enabled to approve changes in the tariffs charged by the electronic communications providers”, specified Alexandrina Hirtan, also giving further details as to the functioning of the current Romanian regulatory system.
Alexandrina Hirtan showed that the independence of ANRC was also officially acknowledged worldwide in February 2004 when the Authority became full member of the Independent Regulators Group (IRG) and observer of the European Regulators Group (ERG), where regulatory authorities from the European Union member states are represented. “In order to become a member, ANRC had to go through a real “test” of independence, several criteria being verified: the structural and functional separation from the market players, especially as regards the separation of the body that exercises the attributions of the state as shareholder in telecom companies; financing – the extra budgetary financing was appreciated as an essential element of the independent status; the procedures for the designation and revoking of the management and the incompatibility between the capacity of a member of the Authority management and a shareholder, associate or member of the management board of the communications companies present in the market; the range of attributions and the concrete results obtained, among which the existence and functionality of the reference interconnection offer was considered very important”.