Under the pretense of avoiding potential abuse of the procedure to compensate former asset owners, the Government recently snuck by a Decision which actually leaves the door wide open for further abuse, by stipulating that the National Authority for the Restitution of Properties (ANRP) will be able to prioritize the issuing of certain payment and/or conversion deeds, whenever "a distortion of the market will occur in the trading of the shares of the Proprietatea Fund, by causing their price to fall, distortion which could endanger the compensation process".

Up to now, the ANRP was only allowed to prioritize the conversion of conversion deeds in exceptional circumstances, with solid justifications, such as due to medical or social reasons.

The wording used in the Government Decision is ambiguous, and is interpretable precisely for that reason.

The document does not define the notion of market distortion (or what the Government means through this notion) now how low the price of the shares would have to be on the exchange for the market to be considered distorted. (Especially since distortion implies an artificial intervention, outside the mechanism of supply and demand which sets the price of a stock).

With these aspects left unclear, the Government, through the ANRP, basically has the possibility to compensate at his own discretion, some of the former asset owners before others, depending on the number of shares that they are set to receive and on the percentage by which the stake of the state in the Fund would be reduced.

The order of the registration of the cases in the ANRP, the only criterion used up to now (at least theoretically) for issuing conversion deeds, would no longer have any relevance.

It is possible that the Government Ordinance was conceived as a way of pushing the stock up, after it dropped in the first half