Six faces of Romania’s rotten politics

Six faces of Romania’s rotten politics

By Carmen Paun

Taken From:Politico Magazine

Romanians get a chance Sunday to vent their anger at endemic corruption in local elections that will be the first vote since anti-graft protests brought down Victor Ponta’s government late last year.

Neither Ponta’s exit, prompted by a deadly nightclub fire blamed on officials turning a blind eye to safety regulations, nor a crackdown by the DNA anti-graft agency that led to indictments against 1,250 public officials — including a prime minister — last year, have put an end to the problem.

Part of the challenge is that Romanian law doesn’t prevent people involved in corruption probes from competing for official posts, such as the 3,000 mayoral posts and 8,000 top spots in city and town councils that are up for grabs this weekend.

With a population of 20 million fairly evenly distributed between town and country, mayors and councilors are big players who get to manage much of the €30 billion in EU funds that Romania is due to receive between 2014 and 2020. The risk of corruption is high: The new mayor of Bucharest, for example, will manage an annual budget of about €900 million.

Here are six candidates running Sunday who illustrate the trouble with Romania’s politics.

The people’s mayor — Marian Vanghelie

He was first elected mayor of Bucharest’s fifth district in 2000 and served until March 2015, when he was arrested on suspicion of taking bribes and money laundering. Suspended from office and put under house arrest, he announced in April, with the investigation still ongoing, that he would try to win back his post.

In early May, the DNA indicted him for abuse of power in a new case, saying he had created a false emergency in 2008 to award a street-cleaning contract to an external company. It is also checking whether signatures collected to support his candidacy for a new term have been forged, according to reports in the Romanian media.

The embattled mayor told reporters he would not be intimidated by the DNA and would campaign from jail if he had to. “I am running again because I want to show that I am not afraid of anyone, just God,” he told a group of supporters on May 26, according to footage from the rally that had been posted on his Facebook page.

He is no stranger to the courts. “Some eight years ago, I had eight cases and I won them all,” Vanghelie boasted at the rally.

A long-time member of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), he was kicked out in 2014 shortly after Ponta lost the presidential elections. He is now at the helm of the relatively unknown Social Justice Party, whose acronym — PDS — can easily be mistaken for Ponta’s PSD.

Dubbed as the mayor with little education and many mandates, Vanghelie remains popular, particularly among the poor.

“I know how it feels to be a kid and open the fridge and only find a bottle of thick milk combined with water from the sink,” he said in campaign speech in his district, which is home to about 270,000 of Bucharest’s two million inhabitants.

The cash-for-amendments MEP — Adrian Severin

A jail sentence from High Court of Cassation and Justice in February for accepting money to introduce amendments to a draft EU law while he was an MEP in 2011 didn’t stop Adrian Severin from throwing his hat in the ring for the mayor of Bucharest.

Since the collapse of communism, Severin has been well-known in Romania and abroad after serving as foreign minister in the 1990s. He maintains his innocence, but resigned from PSD in March 2011 and was excluded from the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament.

In a blog post in March, exactly five years after the scandal broke, Severin laid out his version of events, saying there had been attempts to compromise him. He alleged that undercover agents, posing as reporters for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, were sent to his office.

He wrote that the video published by the British newspaper, which allegedly shows him negotiating the cash-for-amendments deal, was edited and his answers were taken out of context. He plans to appeal the sentence in the High Court. In the meantime, he is running for mayor of Bucharest as a candidate of Vanghelie’s PDS.

“Together we created a party because we want to fight this system which wants to put poor people aside and make them even poorer and make the rich richer,” Severin told a rally, standing next to Vanghelie, according to a video on Vanghelie’s Facebook account.

The disgraced journalist — Robert Turcescu

For years, Robert Turcescu was one of the most famous and respected journalists in Romania, hosting talk shows on TV and radio.

In the autumn of 2014, at the height of the presidential election campaign, he confessed in his blog that he had served as a paid undercover agent for the Romanian Intelligence Service for years. He also published payment documents to support his revelation.

Several PSD politicians asked prosecutors to launch an investigation, but they turned down the case, saying neither Turcescu’s work for the intelligence service nor his announcement that he had been an agent amounted to a breach of national security.

The journalist took a break from public life for a few months, then made a comeback with a new TV show. In April, he emerged as the mayoral candidate for Bucharest on the list of the Popular Movement Party, led by former president Traian Băsescu. The latter was himself mayor before becoming president in 2004.

After announcing his candidacy, Turcescu told the media he was never a spy, despite his own 2014 announcement. “The subject is closed from my point of view. We have to talk about Bucharest in this campaign,” he said during a TV interview.

The indebted businessman — Robert Negoiță

The incumbent mayor of Bucharest’s third district — the city’s most populous — has been in the news for his love life more than his politics. His divorce from a model half his age, and new relationship with a 23-year-old model, even caught the attention of U.K.’s Daily Mail.

Negoiţă tops the list of Romanians who owe money to the public purse. His debt: €51 million, according to a list published in mid-May by the National Agency for Fiscal Administration.

He was indicted for tax evasion in April by anti-corruption prosecutors who accuse him of not paying value added tax for some 1,250 apartments and houses his companies built and sold between 2005 and 2009.

“This investigation is related to facts from the time I was in private management,” he told Romanian media. “It has nothing to do with my activity in any public office.”

In a TV show in mid-May, Negoiță said the debt is unjustified and was miscalculated by the tax agency. “This thing will be settled in court,” he told Realitatea TV, promising to withdraw from public life if judges ruled that he does owe that amount.

Negoiță is a member of PSD and was elected mayor of Bucharest’s third district in 2012.

The mountain man — George Scripcaru

For 11 years, George Scripcaru was mayor of the central city of Brașov, where Dracula’s Castle is located, before he was arrested in 2015 for abuse of office, which allegedly involved taking kickbacks from energy contracts and accepting bribes.

Anti-corruption prosecutors also accused him of contracting a company for services it did not have expertise in and then paying for work that was not executed.

He was released from custody, but remains under judicial supervision while the investigation is pending. Scripcaru was a member of the PNL, but the party withdrew its support after the indictment. He’s running in Brașov, which is a major tourist destination with skiing and hiking resorts, as an independent candidate.

Scripcaru did not respond to a request for comment regarding the accusations by the anti-corruption prosecutors.

The strong woman in the South — Lia Olguța Vasilescu

One of the PSD’s vice-presidents, Lia Olguța Vasilescu is the mayor of Craiova, Romania’s sixth largest city, in the southwest.

She wants another four years in office despite being indicted on four counts of bribery, three counts of using her authority or influence to obtain money or other goods and for money laundering. Briefly arrested at the end of March, she was released while the investigation is ongoing.

She said she is innocent, sees no reason to give up her seat and remains focused on the race to remain mayor of Craiova. “Romania needs people of courage,” she told a TV channel in April.