English
The current situation of the Damen Mangalia Shipyard reflects a major strategic failure of the Romanian state in managing a large-scale industrial opportunity, sources inside the shipyard told the BURSA newspaper.
"80% of the decisions that the management team wanted to make between 2019 and August 2023 and until Damen's definitive withdrawal were rejected by the Romanian state through the Supervisory Board. And here we are talking about restructuring projects, about development, but also about investments. And when it comes to restructuring, don't think that people from production should have been laid off. No. The Dutch from Damen found that certain bureaucratic things, in the sphere of TESA personnel, are oversized in Mangalia. If at the Damen shipyard in Galaţi, in the TESA area, 100 people are employed, in Mangalia the same work was performed by 300 people. Every time they wanted to reduce the number of TESA employees in Mangalia, the state representatives in the Supervisory Board opposed, saying that it was not the time, that elections were coming, etc. Of course, at some point, the Dutch got fed up because they realized that they were being prevented from developing the shipyard. "Basically, the state used the Dutch money to maintain its own machine in which it did not put a single leu from the public budget," the respective sources told us.
We specify that of the seven members of the Supervisory Board at Damen, four are appointed by the Romanian state.
We recall that in 2018, the Damen Shipyards Group company, one of the largest shipbuilders in Europe, agreed to take over the Mangalia shipyard, which was in a state of economic and industrial decline, from the Koreans at DMHI, for a fee. The takeover was carried out in partnership with the Romanian state, which retained 51% of the shares through a company that belongs almost entirely to the Ministry of Economy, while Damen received 49%, although the Dutch company paid the entire transaction amount for most of the shares held by the former Korean employer. Under these conditions, the state agreed that Damen would take over the managerial control of the Mangalia shipyard. This formula, although apparently balanced, generated the premises of a latent conflict between the economic interests of the private investor and the political decisions of the state.
In other words, although the investments and risks were assumed almost exclusively by the Dutch side, the final decisions were systematically blocked by the Romanian side, in the absence of any concrete financial commitment.
This situation ultimately led, in August 2023, to Damen's decision to withdraw completely from the project. The abandonment of an investor of Damen's size not only affects Romania's credibility as a destination for strategic investments, but also leaves the shipyard in an extremely vulnerable position, in an economic and geopolitical context in which the shipbuilding industry is essential.
In conclusion, the Damen Mangalia case is a true x-ray of how excessive politicization and lack of coherence in governance can definitively compromise projects of national interest. Instead of becoming an example of reindustrialization and functional public-private partnership, Damen Mangalia remains a symbol of bureaucratic sabotage and administrative incompetence. The blame, as emerges from the statements of those inside, belongs unequivocally to the Romanian state.
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