* Postponing the payment would temporarily rescue the revenues of the AVAS, but would cost the state more

The Authority for State Assets Recovery (AVAS) is looking to postpone by three years the payment of the money owed to former FNI (National Investment Fund) clients, Aurelian Popa, the chairman of the AVAS said for BURSA yesterday. The Authority is required by law to compensate the deponents of the FNI as soon as it gets any money in its accounts, a situation which has been keeping the institution in a stranglehold for years.

If approved, the postponing of the payment to the victims of the FNI fraud could temporarily save the revenues of the AVAS, but once the delay were to expire, the state would be forced to pay more to than if the current payment schedule were programmed. This is one of the reasons that the officials have previously refused to validate similar proposals to delay the payment of the damages.

"The proposal that M. Popa is making is harmful. In the case of former FNI depositors, the court ruling states that the amounts outstanding will be adjusted by the inflation index notified by the National Statistics Institute, starting with May 20, 2000 until today. If the payment of the outstanding amounts gets postponed by three years, this simply means that the amount will increase even much more because the inflation will need to be included into the final amount", said for BURSA, Mircea Ursache, the former chairman of the Authority for State Assets Recovery.

Mircea Ursache tried to solve the issue of the payment to the former FNI victims by borrowing approximately 50 million Euros from the State Treasury, a plan which eventually fell through.

"I have made a request for a loan from the State Treasury meaning that would have allowed the AVAS to pay all of the outstanding debt to those who lost their money with the FNI, to pr