In an extensive interview with the central daily paper ROMANIA LIBERA, he stated that the nearly 20-billion Euro stand-by loan given by the IMF, the European Commission and other international financial institutions had been the only thing that had kept Bucharest from going bankrupt. The deepening international financial crisis, accompanied in 2009, an election year , by the domestic political crisis, when everybody was campaigning and no one governing the country, had almost ushered in a disaster.

It was then that IMF experts left the country without granting the third payment of the loan. And only after a new government was sworn in, did the IMF finally have an interlocutor in Bucharest. However, Franks does not shy from warning the new cabinet that the governing programme does not include sufficient measures to restart the engines of the economy. He advises Romania to focus on absorbing European funds, so as to invest in developing the infrastructure and implicitly in creating jobs.

Franks hopes that the number of the unemployed, which has already exceeded 700 thousand, will not reach the one-million threshold, in spite of further massive redundancies expected in the first half of this year; unemployment is expected to drop hardly towards the end of the year.

The good news that Franks brings is that an increasing number of foreign investors are interested in Romania. If the reforms agreed on with the IMF and the European Commission are properly implemented, the economy will resume an upward trend in the months to come, Franks concludes in the interview with ROMANIA LIBERA.