After the announcement about his candidacy for the Presidential elections in France, Nicolas Sarkozy took part in a long TV debate. At a certain moment in time, an enterprise manager reproached him the fact that he was too strict with the French employers. This is true if we take into consideration the fact that most of the managers are professionally competent and honest people. However, I have to add that the discussion between Sarkozy and the respective manager had a background of major controversies regarding the behavior of certain enterprise managers. There were a lot of cases in which, even though the productivity of the enterprises was decreasing, the salaries of the top managers were increasing. The leader of the patronage in France, Claude Bebear, wrote a protest book called "Ils vont tuer la capitalisme" (They Will Kill Capitalism) in which he referred to certain colleagues of his who had legal and moral issues. However, Sarkozy made a reasonable assertion: it is one thing when one accepts the relation between the profit of an employer and taking certain risks, but it is a totally different situation when the top managers give themselves higher and higher salaries, while the employees are forced to accept the freezing or the diminution of their salaries.

I used this somewhat longer prologue in order to emphasize an issue that appeared more and more often during the past weeks in Romania based on the scandals regarding a series of privatizations. I am talking about the possible reaction of the foreign investors, about the negative impression caused by these events. Actually, the investors generally want a stable business environment, without taking into consideration the finalized transactions. Moreover, this situation emphasized the weaknesses of the public administration as well as the high-level corruption. This is why the opinion of the investors