It's a combination of incompetence as well as corruption on behalf of the authorities in Romania. The EU keeps a close eye on what their money is being spent on, so lining your pocket with highway money given to you by the EU is a bit of a no-no.
What people seem to remember is who cut the ribbon, so it's a bit of a risk for a party that has a 4 year mandate to build something and not finish it during their term as nobody will remember that they started a project.
For the last two or so years the political alliance in charge of things has been mostly focusing on making the laws more lax as most of them have legal problems, instead of focusing on the peoples' problems. We get what we deserve, since you never really do see a smart people ruled by idiots.
Investing in Romanian infra is primarily something that Romania is responsible for itself, but there is some funding from the EU level. One can browse projects here: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/atlas/romania/
> To be perfectly honest Romania has as much economic importance to the functioning of the EU as the Arizonian desert does to the US.
This is a gross exaggeration. We are a country of around 20 million people and we export a diverse array of finished goods, not to mention setting up shop in Romania if you are a multinational company is very useful as the standard of living is lower and you can pay less than you would pay a German, for example.
> What the Romanian government has done with that money is frankly not something anyone really wants to investigate.
Actually it is investigated, nobody's really turning a blind eye to these things. The EU has an anti-fraud office specifically for this: https://ec.europa.eu/anti-fraud/home_en
Romania has a diverse economy, it is not based on mining, you have many multinationals int he big cities because of high education level(high education is free) of the young people. So we have educated programmers, engineers (as an example some car parts are designed here, some car parts are created here for different manufacturers)
I don’t live in the EU, but how does public infrastructure funding work? Are there no funds to invest in infrastructure?
It seems like trading partners would benefit a lot from a more connected Romania.