Fewer than 20 private companies have ten-year lease contracts for berths in the Port of Constanta. The owners of some of them hide behind the web of offshore and check people. The situation is not new, but recent months have drawn attention to the need to clean up the port, a national, economic and military-strategic goal.

The summer that has ended marks the best and worst of the port of Constanta. The war in Ukraine gave us a chance to establish a regional role of unprecedented importance, but the failure of the authorities and port operators to put infrastructure in place meant that this opportunity was also essentially missed.

Thus, 2022 will go down in the books as a year with record revenues for port operators and the state-owned company that manages the Port of Constanta. However, this will be a year in Romania’s history when, due to record inflation and a food crisis on the verge of exploding, the Port of Constanța was unable to effectively process thousands of tons of grain and agri-food products, which would mean lower food prices not only nationally, but regionally as well.

The blockade of the port of Constanta has been high on the public agenda for the past six months. I explained in detail in the article “Made for trains choked by trucks: how the port of Konstanz loses its chance to count in Europe”, where waiting times of tens of hours for loading and unloading operations on the seashore turned out to be black.

While attention was focused rather on the lack of coordinated actions of the authorities led by the Port Authority and the Ministry of Transport, an essential detail was lost in the public debate: the companies that control access to the Black Sea are characterized by an opacity that is difficult to explain in the context in which the port and commercial activity here are areas of national strategic importance.

Read in full at Panorama.ro