The former president of Romania’s National Authority for Property Restitution (ANRP), Crinuta Dumitrean, and a former vice-president of the authority, Oana Vasilescu, were both held by the prosecutors of the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) on Monday, for their involvement in a restitution case in which the state was prejudiced EUR 62.5 million.

The DNA prosecutors also asked for the approval of the Deputies Chamber to arrest deputies Catalin Florin Teodorescu and Marko Attila-Gabor, who were also members in the ANRP commission which granted the restitution.

On Friday, DNA also held the chief prosecutor of the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), Alina Mihaela Bica, in the same case. Bica resigned from DIICOT and was suspended from her job as a prosecutor.

Three other people were also arrested in this case: Lacramioara Alexandru and Dragos-Gheorghe Bogdan, who were both members of the ANRP commission for compensations, and Emil Nutiu, an appraisal expert, who played a key role in this case.

The case is as follows: Romanian businessman Stelian Gheorghe bought the litigious rights for a 13-hectare land in Plumbuita, on Bucharest’s outskirts, which had been confiscated by the communist regime from its rightful owners. This basically means that the rightful owners of the land sold him the right to recover the land or get compensated by the state for an amount of money.

Stelian Gheorghe then went to the National Authority for Property Restitution (ANRP), the state institution which determined the compensations paid to people whose assets had been confiscated by the communist regime, to ask for compensation for the land. ANRP uses appraisal expert to determine the value of the assets to be compensated. In this case, the expert, Emil Nitu, determined that the value of the land was EUR 89.4 million.

Prosecutors now say that the value found by the expert is EUR 62.5 million higher than the real value of the land, which was only EUR 26.9 million. They found that the land had been appraised as if it had been located in Bucharest’s city center.

However, none of the members of the ANRP commission which ruled the value of the compensations for Stelian Gheorghe, had any objection in granting him the full EUR 89.4 million. Crinuta Dumitrean, Oana Vasilescu, Alina Bica, Lacramioara Alexandru and Dragos-Gheorghe Bogdan, were all members of the commission at that time, as well as the two deputies, Catalin Florin Teodorescu and Marko Attila-Gabor.

Prosecutors say they all knew that the appraised value for the land was too big, as they had previously analysed the case and postponed taking a decision. They even invited the expert who appraised the land to a meeting of the commission. Yet in spite of all this, on March 15, 2011, they unanimously decided in favour of granting Stelian Gheorghe the full EUR 89.4 million compensation, which was paid by Romania’s Finance Ministry in Fondul Proprietatea shares. They are all now accused of corruption.

This was one of the largest compensations granted by the Romanian state in the whole restitution process, and, as it appears from this investigation, it robbed the state of some EUR 62.5 million.

However, many would say that this was just the tip of the iceberg in Romania’s restitution process, which only compensated a few of the people whose properties had been confiscated by the communist regime, but which managed to make a small number of businessmen and politicians very rich.

editor@romania-insider.com