Poor Vergil Voineagu was dismissed on Friday by Victor Ponta from the management of the National Statistics Institute (INS), being accused of having made a huge mistake which caused the GDP for the year 2011 to be 21 billion lei than it actually was, but it was mere happenstance that the decision to dismiss him was made by Ponta, because in November 2011, Emil Boc had also threatened to fire Voinea. At the time of the census, Emil Boc had said that the head of the INS had shown "the supreme form of incompetence".
At 19:00, on Friday, it was found that there was no calculation mistake, rather, the difference of 21 billion lei comes from the updating of the data, according to the European methodology he uses, but poor Voineagu failed to convince anybody and the top position of the INS was temporarily offered to Mrs. Beatrix Gered, the vice-president of the INS, who has the support of the UDMR. Beatrice Gered is notorious for having fainted in July 2010 on the stairs of the Government building occupied by the Cabinet of Emil Boc, and for being the vice-president who was dismissed and reinstated in July 2012 by Victor Ponta, when the prime minister was scrambling to diminish the number of citizens who had the right to vote in the Referendum to dismiss Băsescu.
When I say "poor" Voineagu, I don't mean that he has been wronged in any way - I've always been convinced that the National Statistics Institute is a political instrument, which massages numbers, which will shred papers whenever asked to do so by the government (which it answers to), whether it changes the structure of the consumer basket for the Năstase cabinet, to make it less obvious that inflation has boomed, whether it's raising the GDP for Emil Boc, so he can get a better sovereign rating, in turn allowing him to borrow on the foreign markets and fire fewer civil sector workers, thus avoiding bei
