Well, that's in Russia - I always had the opinion of considering the bribes just as some overheads when budgeting business in Romania as well.

In the Romanian case I think that things have improved lately, though, on a slightly related note I can tell you that yesterday I was forced to pay a bribe to the train conductors to let me carry my bike on the way to the mountains. The problem was simple: since there's no regulation in SNCFR's way of conduct (that would be the national railway company) specifying that you're allowed (or not) to carry bikes in trains the conductors told us that by default we're not allowed to do it, though we had tickets and were offering to pay an extra fee for the bikes. Whatever it was worth. Eventually we worked things out in the usual style, but be aware of it if for some reason you want to go biking in the Romanian mountains and have the train as your mean of transportation.