Romania’s Parliament rejected on Wednesday the 2014 activity report of the public television (TVR) and dismissed the institution’s board of directors and general manager Stelian Tanase. The Parliament also voted Irina Radu, a former news anchor at TVR, as interim general manager.

The Parliament’s decision came just day after TVR’s general manager Stelian Tanase said in a TV show on TVR that Deputy Prime Minister Gabriel Oprea had decided to “liquidate him” from TVR’s management. Tanase also said that Oprea had asked him to remove a news piece about his plagiarized PhD thesis.

“He told me that only the state television attacked him and he was very angry about the subject. I told him I couldn’t remove content and that I didn’t have control over the editorial. I also told him that if I asked for a news piece to be removed, we would both be on the front cover of newspapers the next day,” Stelian Tanase said on Monday evening, according to Mediafax.

Deputy Prime Minister Oprea didn’t react to this on Tuesday, as he was away at the European Justice and Internal Affairs Council. However, Prime Minister Victor Ponta jumped in his defense on Wednesday. “I don’t trust Stelian Tanase to be telling the truth, as I’ve caught him lying too many times,” Ponta said.

He added that the Government would support the public television, but would not increase the public radio-TV tax. He suggested that the institution should make better use of the resources it had. “The public television is the TV station with the highest budget and the biggest debt, but with the lowest audience and public impact in Romania,” Ponta said.

Ponta’s Social Democratic Pary (PSD) and Gabriel Oprea’s National Union for Romania’s Progress (UNPR) both voted against the public television’s activity report. A total of 220 MPs voted against the report while only 115 voted for it, most of them from the National Liberal Party (PNL). In fact it was PNL which named Stelian Tanase to take over as general manager of TVR, back in December 2013. At that time, PNL was PSD’s governing partner.

TVR had EUR 18 million losses in 2014. Stelian Tanase said the losses were caused by the EUR 180 million historical debt, which he “inherited” from the previous management.

Irina Radu, TVR’s interim general manager started as news anchor at TVR1 in the early ‘90s. She was a member of the television’s board of directors between 1998 and 2002. She organized TVR’s Cerbul de Aur (The Golden Stag) festival for several years. She was also director of the TVR1 channel between 2004 and 2006, when she left the public institution to work with Turkish group Dogan Media, which had just launched its Kanal D channel in Romania. In 2010 she left Kanal D to work with Intact group, which owns the Antena 1 and Antena 3 TV stations, and in 2013 she returned to TVR as programs director.

editor@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: stelian-tanase.ro)