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Telecom .IT: Romania hopes to find support from Bulgaria and Hungary for common telecom infrastructure projects
Romania is prepared to use the opportunity of building telecom infrastructures accessing the funds earmarked through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and will have contacts in this respect with Bulgaria and Hungary to find support for creating common projects, Romanian Minister for Information Society Alexandru-Razvan Cotovelea said in Brussels on Wednesday, May 14.
The Minister had an informal meeting with European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes, on which occasion he talked, among others, about the opportunities of accessing the European funds in the period 2014-2020.
When asked if Romania would try to access the funds earmarked through the CEF in the 2014-2020 programming period for building telecom infrastructures, he said:
'We especially need a partner in the European Union area or associate of the EU. Obviously, it is very difficult in the context in which we only have two prospects, Bulgaria or Hungary. When I took over the mandate I knew there were certain talks, we still haven't had concrete, technical talks, there is still time. We had a first contact and a joint government meeting in Ruse, three weeks ago, we are going to meet the colleagues of Budapest, too, and I hope that, if we find support from the two member states, we shall be able to file common projects. If we don't, we shall manage to fund our public interventions from the instruments we shall have at our disposal.'
Razvan Cotovelea also said that Romania made 'great progress in terms of concretely launching the implementing of the Ro-NET project, with an 84 million euro funding on 783 areas.'