The National Bank of Romania (NBR) yesterday presented the new coins and bills that will be used to replace the ROL. The new money will be called RON and will keep the portraits and colour backgrounds of their current counterparts.
The new currency will first enter circulation on July 1, and will gradually replace the old money. The process is scheduled for completion by December 2006.
Redenomination entails cutting four zeroes off the ROL. In its new form, the RON will be the most important currency in Central and Eastern Europe, with one RON worth slightly more than 8 Czech kruna.
"It will take us eight to ten years from now to shift to the euro, meaning that the structure of the new issue in terms of denominations needs to take into account the purchasing power of the RON against the euro," said Mugur Isarescu, NBR governor.
He added that when deciding the new structure, the NBR kept in mind the need for continuity with the old issue, as well as the purchasing power ratio and correspondence with euro denominations.
"We decided that the lowest-value bill should be one RON, which will correspond to the five-euro bill in accordance with the purchasing power principle. This is because one RON in Romania currently buys two loaves of bread, while the same product costs around five euros in the European Union".
The new bills will come in the following denominations: one, five, ten, fifty, one hundred and five hundred RON. The first five bills have counterparts in the old money, while the 500 RON bill will be new.
"Purchasing power was taken into account here, too, as were the needs of the Romanian economy," the governor explained. The 500 RON bill is currently worth 140 euros.
The new bills will have the same size as euro bills, with similarities starting from the one RON bill that will be exactly the same size as the five-euro bill. This feature will help reduce the cost of adjusting cash dispensers when shifting to the euro.
The coins in the new issue, which come in one, five, ten and fifty bani denominations, will be of similar sizes to euro coins.
"The issue will be unitary and logical, the sizes of the denominations will increase in proportion with their value," added Isarescu.
For the new bill, the 500 RON, which has no match among current denominations, the National Bank''s Board of Directors decided to use the portrait of poet Mihai Eminescu. The reverse depicts an issue of the "Timpul" (Time) journal, the University Library of Iasi, and a lime tree.
The new denominations will have multiple security features, divided into three general categories: publicly known features, features known to bank clerks, and features known only to authorised people within the central bank. New bills will have up to eight of the publicly known type of security features, depending on their value.
For the coins, the main security features will be the alloy from which they are made and their rim.
liviu.chiru@zf.ro
TITL: PSD seeks to solve credibility problems
Mirela Luca
The PSD (Social Democrat Party), a party currently facing serious credibility problems, met yesterday to elect its new leaders. As it turned out, however, the candidates running for leadership were in fact the same party leaders of old.
The party''s leaders are looking for ways to make the party credible.
PSD leader Adrian Nastase called on his fellow party members "to come out and fight" and not to allow images to be created that represent them as the "party of thieves" or the "party of the corrupt".
Nastase admitted that one of the biggest mistakes made by the former ruling party was that it had taken the slander coming from the political opposition and from society "calmly."
"At first we thought that answering them was irrelevant, but this only served to worsen our image and downplay our performance as a ruling party," the party leader told delegates at the party convention.
"If someone from PSD was involved in illegal business, then they should be punished! If someone from PSD supported illegal businesses, then that should be proven and convicted, and we will withdraw our political support from them!"
He added it wasn''t right that the idea of common guilt still existed in the 21st century.
Ion Iliescu, the former president, said that PSD''s most difficult struggle would not be that with its political enemies, but that being fought to regain the confidence of the people in the party''s ability to "rid" itself of those people and practices that caused it to be labelled a party of the corrupt. This image, believes Iliescu, is "profoundly unjust", "does not reflect the reality" and is "an attack on the dignity of hundreds of thousands of honest party members". These members, he went on, would have every right to their express outrage at how political adversaries have blamed the party as a whole and indiscriminately pointed the finger at its members.
Iliescu explained his return to the party and his running for leader by saying he had "the strength and determination to contribute to reforming and renewing the party." The convention began with a blunder by Iliescu, who was chairing the meeting. Inviting the former prime minister to take the floor, he addressed him as "Comrade Adrian Nastase", causing murmurs from the audience.
mirela.luca@zf.ro
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