”No more than 3% of the top managers in Romania are really good,” Radu Furnica, president of executive search company Leadership Development Solutions (LDS), said in an interview to BUSINESS Magazin.

”The rest are all impostors, to some extent,” believes the head of LDS, who has, for over 13 years, been the Romanian partner of one of the world’s largest executive search companies, Korn/Ferry International.

Coming from Furnica, one of the oldest and most expensive head hunters on the Romanian market, who has clients such as Lafarge, Nestlé, Renault, Unilever, Heineken, MasterCard and Millennium Bank in his portfolio, the conclusion is all the more shocking. ”In Romanian companies, the number of top managers able to add real value to the business they run is extremely small,” says the head of LDS, who has recently distinguished himself by handling one of the most widely media covered placement contracts on the Romanian market. In mid-January, Radu Furnica acted as an intermediary when Petru Vaduva replaced Anca Ioan at the helm of Tiriac Holdings, a group whose turnover is estimated to stand at around 2.2 billion euros. Top management abilities are all the more important in difficult economic times, like those we are going through now, says the head hunter, and some companies, whose management has been left in the hands of executives unable to cope in times of crisis, may never weather the crisis.

The situation that Furnica describes is hard to explain, if we consider that, after several years of sustained growth, salary packages of top managers at the helm of large corporations have reached sixdigit sums, and, in some cases, even one million euros per year. On the other hand, the majority of multinationals that have entered the Romanian market over the last few years, entrusted the management of their local subsidiaries to foreign managers, whose experience on other markets should have served as solid proof of their skills. Over the last few years, there has been talk of a tendency to progressively replace foreign managers with Romanian ones, including in many companies that in the 1990s had to resort to foreign managers as there were no Romanians good enough for the job.