Article 56 of the Treaty establishing the European Community prohibits all restrictions on the movement of capital between Member States and between Member States and third countries. However, Member States may apply some restrictions in respect of the movement of capital to or from third countries. The free movement of capital applies not only to payments and money transfers abroad but also to transactions involving the transfer of the property right. This chapter covers also the payments systems by means of the two directives on the cross-border credit transfers and on the settlement finality in payment and securities settlement systems as well as of the directives on the prevention of money laundering.

As regards the current account and capital account transactions, the National Bank of Romania has been directly involved in achieving the objectives under this negotiation chapter. The commitments in this field have been included in the Position Paper and the three Complementary position Papers under Chapter 4 - Free Movement of Capital. The accession negotiations under this chapter have been initiated by the elaboration of the Position Paper approved by the Romanian Government in its meeting of February 2001. Subsequently, it was updated several times and the negotiations under Chapter 4 have been provisionally closed on the occasion of the Intergovernmental Accession Conference Romania - EU which took place on 7 April 2003.

The liberalization of the capital account transactions proceeded according to the following principles: (i) inflows before the outflows, (ii) medium and long term flows before short term flows, (iii) direct investment before portfolio investment, (iv) respecting the sequence banks - companies - households.

In Romania, the foreign exchange regime is regulated by the NBR Regulation No. 4/2005 as further amended and supplemented, which confirms the full liberalization of the capital account operations beginning 1 September 2006.