I spent the best years of my life – the student years – in Romania. Unfortunately, it was the Romania of Nicolae Ceausescu and communism there was much tougher than in the other countries of the then-Warsaw Pact, including my native Bulgaria.
Everyday life in Romania in the 1970s was difficult, food was scarce, and there was always someone watching you and reporting to Securitate, the notorious secret police.
Ceausescu wanted Romanians to reach 30 million, so contraceptives didn’t exist, and abortions were prohibited. Today it is estimated that around 10,000 women died of primitive forms of abortions.
There weren’t such statistics then, but each one of us knew at least one young woman who had died because of Ceausescu’s crazy natality policies. Unwanted children were raised in filthy orphanages reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps.
When the horror-asylum scandal in Romania broke last week, all these memories came to my mind and with them, the question: How could such horror happen again?
Essentially, this is a corruption story perpetrated by well-positioned people without respect for human dignity.
A crime ring collected state subsidies earmarked for the disabled, which can run up to around €1,000 per person per month, while the elderly meant to receive the funds were essentially imprisoned, beaten, and kept without food.
It’s also a mafia story – this is what it should be called whenever a crime ring benefits from obvious protections from above.
“Everybody knew” was how a Romanian news outlet titled its story, listing the various authorities who were aware of what was happening, starting with the office of the mayor of Voluntari, a suburb of Bucharest, where three such centres were located.
Reportedly the office of the mayor had known since 2021. The mayor, Florentin Pandele, says he was not aware. So says his wife too, Gabriela Firea, the former mayor of Bucharest and family minister at the time the scandal broke.
Firea was forced by Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu to step down after a meeting in the government building to avoid damaging the image of the PSD party, as Romania will hold four rounds of elections next year.
This is a political earthquake for Romania, as Firea was a PSD heavyweight with huge influence in the country’s governance and was touted as a possible candidate for the next president.
What struck me was that some of the names mentioned in the horror-asylum scandal were the same ones I came across when I reported how the Romanian authorities revoked the license of Euroins, a Bulgarian company which was the biggest car insurer on the Romanian market.
Firea gave political backing to Cristian Roșu, the vice president of Romanian regulator ASF, which controversially revoked Euroins license. Roșu’s cousin, Florin Pandele, also defended Firea’s husbands’ business interests at a meeting in Sofia with the principal of Euroins, the Bulgarian holding Eurohold.
Then, on 14 November 2019, Cristian Muntean, at that time counsellor to Roșu, made a “private” visit to Eurohold’s headquarters in Sofia, accompanied by Pandele who was the administrator and shareholder of Auto Car Group.
Eurohold alleged “corruption of extraordinary proportions” where money was being siphoned from the insurer for the profit of the car repair business, in which Auto Car Group is a big player.
A wiretap made public suggests that Roșu and Pandele proposed a deal to Eurohold.
The deal was that Euroins pay money to Florin Pandele in exchange for less hassle for the insurer from the Romanian regulator.
The conflict of interest was well-documented and has been on the radar of the Romanian judiciary, but the protagonists were white-washed.
Why am I not surprised to find the same protagonists in two seemingly unrelated scandals?
Possibly because I know Romania a bit, I know the importance of the PSD in running state affairs, even when this party is officially in opposition. My assessment may be subjective, but when power is high above the law, I see the ghost of Ceausescu.
The Roundup
The European Commission has signed a non-binding agreement with Argentina to facilitate a stable supply of liquefied fossil gas (LNG) to Europe in exchange for cooperation on green energy and Buenos Aires reigning in gas leakage.
The EU-Latin America summit this week will not be overshadowed by the Europeans’ preoccupation with the war in Ukraine, Brazil’s EU ambassador Pedro Miguel da Costa e Silva told EURACTIV.
WhatsApp updated its privacy policy on Monday by switching to the ‘legitimate interest’ legal basis following an Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s sanction in January.
The vote on the EU’s proposed pesticides regulation in the European Parliament’s agriculture committee has been pushed back to October, further narrowing the window to reach an agreement ahead of next year’s EU elections.
Don’t miss this week’s Agrifood Podcast: Nature restoration special & farming emissions
Look out for…
- Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans meets with European CEOs of International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) on Tuesday.
- Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meets Uruguay’s President Luis Lacalle Pou on Tuesday, witnesses signing of Memorandum of Understanding between EU and Uruguay on energy cooperation
- Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni participates in G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in India, Sunday-Tuesday.
- Informal meeting of agriculture and fisheries ministers in Brussels, Monday-Tuesday.
Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
