Romania ready to exit EU corruption monitoring

Romanian PM hopes this will happen before 2019.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is ready to take Romania off a corruption-monitoring scheme imposed when it joined the EU in 2007, he said on Monday.

Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the EU at the same time, were both tasked with reforming their legal systems and cleaning up corruption — and in Bulgaria’s case also combating organized crime. For Romania, the so-called Cooperation and Verification Mechanism will end during the mandate of the current Commission, which runs until 2019, Juncker said.

“If Romania is ready before Bulgaria, it’s obvious that this mechanism has to end,” he told a joint news conference in Brussels with the visiting Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Cioloș.

The latest annual report of the Mechanism process was released in late January, when the Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans said: “Romania and Romanians have shown their willingness to fight corruption and to protect the independence of the judiciary.”

That was the country’s third consecutive positive report, according to Romanian diplomats.

Cioloș, a former EU agriculture commissioner who took office in November after Victor Ponta’s government collapsed because of public anger at official corruption, said the Mechanism had “achieved its purpose from the point of view of the Commission when it started,” though the country still has much work to do.