Romania will lose money from the PNRR because the former Minister of European Funds, Dragoş Pîslaru, reported deceased persons as being deinstitutionalized, the Minister of Labor, Florin Manole, said on Monday in a video message posted on his Facebook page.
“Dragoş Pîslaru reported deceased persons as being deinstitutionalized. This shows cynicism and lack of professionalism. In addition, almost 500 other cases were non-compliant. They embellished the numbers, made false reports. For this reason, the correction of funds from the PNRR is inevitable. Romania will lose money, because the verification and reporting, which had to be done in July and August, were wrong. Pîslaru was warned several times, in writing, in August, by colleagues from the Ministry of Labor.
He was then told that it is necessary to verify and complete the data, and to add supporting documents necessary for the proper fulfillment of the PNRR target. Not only did this not happen, but more seriously, under the signature of the president of ANPDPD, wrong data, including deceased persons, were sent to the European Commission”, said Manole.
According to the head of Labor, until July 8, 2026, the general framework necessary for deinstitutionalization was established, and all the actors involved were officially informed that deaths, transfers to other centers and non-compliant forms of housing cannot be taken into account.
On July 10, the deinstitutionalization file was handed over to the new ANPDPD management through an official protocol. It then had almost two months, until August 31, to verify and ensure the compliance of the files.
“At the beginning of September, ANPDPD announced that the target had been reached, reporting 3,976 deinstitutionalized people. When the table reached the European Commission, missing information, deaths, transfers to other residential centers and people who were not institutionalized until 2020 were identified. The Commission urgently requested the revision of the data.
Following the verification made at the ministry, 478 cases were eliminated: persons who died or who were not institutionalized until 2020 or did not have supporting documents, others were in unregulated forms of housing, others in the process of being deinstitutionalized or transferred to other centers. Therefore, the real figure was not 3,976, but 3,498 deinstitutionalized persons. We will not cover this mistake and we will not replace the reality with a convenient figure”, he claimed.
