Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Several hundreds of people were protesting in the village of Silistea-Pungesti in Eastern Romania on Wednesday against plans by US company Chevron to start operating the first shale gas exploration drill in the county of Vaslui, news agency Agerpres reports.
Protesters - some of whom have come from the Barlad, Iasi and other cities in the region of Moldova, Eastern Romania, some of whom are locals from Pungesti - installed tents on the field where Chevron machines are to be deployed. They remained there over night to protest today and said they would not leave the perimeter and would not allow representatives of the US company to come to the area.
On Wednesday afternoon, some 500 people were taking part in the protest. Some locals forced a line of intervention police deployed in the area and managed to reach the perimeter they were not allowed in. Vaslui county prefect Radu Renga warned that laws must be complied it and that gendarmes have to intervene when public order and traffic on public roads are affected.
The first exploration drill is to be deployed in the close vicinity of the village of Pungesti.
Chevron Romania holds another three certificates for the county of Vaslui to start explorations in order to identify possible shale gas reserves.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Fabrizio Dicone had just one day to decide if he wanted to leave Rome and help create “the third big bang” – a new watchdog for Europe’s troubled banking industry.

Within a few weeks Dicone had cleared his desk at the Bank of Italy, said goodbye to his family and friends, and moved to Frankfurt – where the European Central Bank must set up the supervisory body from scratch by this time next year.

Dicone’s rapid career move shows how the ECB is going about a job it never expected to have to do. European Union finance ministers awarded the ECB sweeping new powers only a week ago, and on Wednesday it will already announce plans for scrutinising the health of about 130 leading euro zone banks.

The ECB faces a daunting task in creating the pan-European body; within 12 months it must hire 770 supervisors and around 230 support staff. With little time to train people for a job where experience counts, it must recruit talent from national supervisory organisations like Dicone and the private sector.

For Dicone, the career decision wasn’t too hard even though it meant leaving the Italian central bank’s palazzo in Rome for a modern office tower in Frankfurt, Germany’s financial centre which was rebuilt rapidly from the ruins of World War Two.

“It is a great opportunity,” Dicone said, sitting at the ECB’s headquarters seven months later. “In Rome, I used to apply the rules, here we are writing the rules. I’m honoured to be part of this group of pioneers.”

Dicone, 32, is part of a team compiling a manual that spells out how leading banks in all 17 euro zone countries will be supervised from Frankfurt from November next year.

The task is simple in theory and complex in practice. Supervision of the bloc’s most significant banks will move from national bodies to the ECB as part of the banking union project.

This aims to restore confidence in European banks after the crisis that erupted in 2008, and avert future shocks by achieving closer financial integration across the bloc.

Inside the ECB, this “Single Supervisory Mechanism” (SSM) is called “the third big bang”, following the launch of the ECB’s forerunner, the European Monetary Institution, and then the creation of the ECB itself in 1998.

The ECB recognises it is working against the clock, but it cannot cut corners in a project that will test the credibility of both the banking system and itself.

“What lies ahead of us is an enormous challenge. It is clear that we will not make any compromises in terms of quality when recruiting staff for the future bank supervisor at the ECB just to speed things up,” said ECB chief economist Peter Praet.

Praet, who is also responsible for staff matters on the ECB board, told the German financial daily Boersen-Zeitung that the SSM launch could be delayed in an emergency.