Interior minister: Keeping Romania out of Schengen, losses of 25 billion euros

The losses suffered by Romania by being kept outside the Schengen area exceed 25 billion euros, claims the Minister of the Interior, Lucian Bode.

Asked Thursday by journalists, at the Parliament, how much money was invested to secure the external borders to Schengen standards, Bode said that only for the Ministry of the Interior, the costs exceeded one billion euros – partly from Romania’s budget, partly from European funds. It is about modern technology at the border, equipment, the training of over 60,000 employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the two Schengen training centers in Buzău and Ploiesti.

“Beyond this financial effort, the losses recorded by Romania in the 11 years since it meets all the conditions and does not benefit from the related rights are immeasurable. I saw an analysis of one of the Big Four companies – the calculation was somewhere around 200 million lei in losses per month. Do a calculation and we exceed 25 billion euros in losses recorded by Romania due to non-adherence to this common space”, said Bode.

On Monday, four days after Austria’s vote that blocked Romania’s entry into Schengen, Interior Minister Lucian Bode – who was asked to resign by the opposition over this failure – wrote to his Austrian counterpart, Gerhard Karner, to “express his deep indignation “: “You have made a political game unworthy of a country which has such a rich political tradition and which has been a consolidated democracy for so long.”