* Former owners: The payments had been stopped for one year already
Having run out of shares in the Proprietatea Fund, and being pressured by the European Court of Human Rights to speed up the process for the compensation of the former asset owners whose assets were abusively seized by the Communist regime, the government has come up with a temporary solution.
The government yesterday decided to suspend for six months the issuing of compensation deeds for the properties nationalized by the communist regime.
However, the former asset owners say that the payment of the compensation had stopped about one year ago.
"Most likely «the clever boys» have already been paid, and now, the payments for the «commoners» have been stopped", said Adrian Iuraşcu, of the "Civic Force" political party and representative of some former asset owner associations. He said: "The issue of the compensations has been completely abandoned by the current political class".
He reminded that the "Romanian Civic Forum" has asked the ANRP, in November last year, to run an investigation, by clearly revealing nine problems of the compensations process.
Through an ECHR decision, the Romanian authorities are required to speed up the compensation process, by July 2012.
The European Court of Human Rights made this decision following the numerous lawsuits against the Romanian state, due to the procedure it used to return the properties seized by the communist regime to their former owners.
The compensation deeds can be compensated through the conversion of shares issued by the Proprietatea Fund or through the conversion into payment deeds. But the stake of the Romanian state in the Proprietatea Fund is almost completely depleted.
Right now the Ministry of Finance only has 2.69% of the shares of the Proprietatea Fund left, but that block of shares
