Romania’s net average salary in December was at 1,496 lei (EUR1=RON4.2609), up 8.6% compared with the previous month, due to granting of bonuses, for vacations or the winter holidays, production increases, and to returning from furlough, the country's statistics institute said Friday. read more...

A suspicious piece of luggage found near Israel’s embassy in Bucharest had authorities on alert Friday morning but it turned out to be just a scare. read more...

Portuguese Millennium Bank delayed to 2013 the return to profit of its Romanian subsidiary, opened in the autumn of 2007, given that it posted a 24m-euro loss last year. read more...

Passengers of Wizz Air and Blue Air low-cost airlines who want to ask for information or book plane tickets through the call centre must pay 2.68 RON (0.62 euros) per minute for a phone call from the country, three times more than when calling in another mobile telephony network, according to the data published on low-cost airlines' websites and with ZF calculations. read more...

Greg Konieczny, manager of Fondul Proprietatea (FP) and one of the most influential professionals on the domestic capital market, is speaking for the first time about how the Fund will repurchase stock from the market. The stake of this operation is huge, so that the managers, just like the major Central Banks, are betting on the surprise element to support FP share price. read more...

Swedish retailer Hennes&Mauritz, with 14 billion euros in turnover, will begin operations on the Romanian fashion market on March 25. The 1.9 billion-euro market per year saw leading H&M rivals Zara and C&A report profit from the first full year in business. read more...

The Government decided via an emergency ordinance to eliminate the possibility of owners, builders and developers who infringed on urban plans to get the so called "urban plans to ensure compliance after the fact" for buildings that do not comply with the plans. read more...

Retail sales, the main indicator that measures the consumer spending trend, fell by 7.2% in December last year against the same period of 2009, with the biggest decline being recorded by non-food products, show data of the National Statistics Institute (INS). read more...

Russia's Lukoil, and Petrom, the biggest company on the Romanian market, are in the process of completing investments of over 600 million euros in 2011 in energy production facilities. These are among the few conventional energy projects carried out in the last 20 years, being the first challenges to the state's monopoly in the sector. read more...

The Turkish recipe of no-interest instalments for purchases paid by credit card has become the "key" to rebooting lending in banks' eyes, so that five top banks introduced this facility last year. read more...

Romania’s largest oil company OMV Petrom (SNP.RO), owned by Austria's OMV, Friday raised its diesel oil pump prices by 0.06 lei (EUR1=RON4.2609) per liter, keeping its gasoline prices unchanged. read more...

Most insurers on the Romanian market are not prepared financially for a new earthquake like the one in Bucharest in 1977, mainly because of the lack of reinsurance, said Cristian Constantinescu, president of the National Union of Romanian Insurance and Reinsurance Companies (UNSAR). read more...

Romanian inflation is likely to reach and even surpass 6% at the end of December, due to upward pressure from international food prices and the government’s commitment to eliminate subsidies for thermal energy, analysts of ING Bank Romania said Friday. read more...

The European Commission has triggered infringement procedures against Romania for limiting the authorization of fiscal warehouses to energy products through government emergency decree 54/2010 amending the Tax Code, the Romanian Union of Road Transporters said Friday. read more...

Romanian’s Prime Minister Emil Boc said Friday the Government and the business environment must share responsibility concerning the absorption of European funds. read more...

PM Boc invited Chinese businessmen to invest in Romania in a series of projects that will be conducted in a public-private partnership, like the Comarnic Brasov highway or the Sibiu – Pitesti highway. The offer was launched during a meeting between the PM and representatives of the Chinese state, to mark the new Chinese year. read more...

The impact of Egypt’s protests is very high for Romanian tourism agencies. Compared to Tunis, which was a decreasing market in the last three years, Egypt was an increasing market, tourism consultant Traian Badulescu concludes in an analysis for HotNews.ro on the impact of Egypt protests on tourist operators in Romania. read more...