For years, post-communist media mogul Dan Voiculescu denied reports that he had worked for Nicolae Ceausescu’s repressive Securitate secret police.
He brushed off the allegations and sued over claims that he had been officially linked to the dreaded secret police. When he lost the court cases, whose rulings were based on the Securitate archives, he appealed.
In 2011, a court ruled he had collaborated with the Securitate under the pseudonym ‘Felix’ and ‘Mircea’. He appealed, but in 2013, the court upheld the ruling.
Now, in a controversial turn of events, the Bucharest Court has decided that Crescent Commercial & Maritime (Cyprus) Limited, of which he was one of the founders according to media reports, is not the company of the former Securitate.
The judges issued the statement in a civil lawsuit in which the Cypriot company demanded damages of 150,000 lei from former judge Camelia Bogdan.
Dr. Bogdan claimed, in an interview, that Dan Voiculescu, who had power of attorney over the accounts of Crescent, made several transfers, without being investigated by prosecutors.
But judges Lucia Ioana Frunza and Andreea Simona Suciu of the Bucharest Tribunal ruled on Monday that the defendant’s public statements about the plaintiff’s links to the former Securitate and alleged money laundering were unlawful, according to the court decision.
The court ruled that Dr. Bogdan should pay the Cypriot company 10,050 lei (about 2,000 euros) in stamp duty and lawyer’s fees. The ruling can be appealed.
In an interview, the former judge claimed that “starting in 1990, Mr. Dan Voiculescu, having power of attorney over the accounts of Crescent, which belonged to the former Securitate, directed the money without the Romanian state authorities bothering him for a second. It is necessary to investigate what happened to the money that belongs to the Romanian people.”
“Romanian prosecutors are overwhelmed by the situation, either out of apathy or for other reasons. For this reason, I appreciate that the Romanian state must contract specialists / law firms, specialized in the recovery of the proceeds of crime. In fact, in 1990, the Romanian state started such an investigation, but the Romanian authorities – the former Romanian Bank of Foreign Trade and the Romanian Government – prevented the investigation, refusing to cooperate.”
Dan Voiculescu was one of the richest men in Romania, with a fortune estimated at 1.5–1.6 billion euros, according to Top 300 Richest Romanian People published by Capital magazine.
In 2014, Voiculescu, the former owner of TV channel Antena, was handed a 10-year sentence for money laundering at which point his daughters took over the television station. One of the judges was Camelia Bogdan. The court ordered the confiscation of the TV studios to cover damages.
What is Crescent?
According to Presa Libera, Crescent is the company through which the Danube Foreign Trade Enterprise (ICE), a foreign trade company established in 1982 by the Securitate, kept in touch with Romania’s foreign partners during communism.
Most of the state-owned companies worked through ICE Danube, and ICE Danube worked with overseas partners through Crescent.
Between 1983 and 1989, ICE Danube’s export contracts were worth a total of 4.59 billion dollars, the report said.
Crescent Commercial & Maritime was formally registered in Nicosia, Cyprus on April 16, 1984. On the registration document, E 21820, the directors were listed as Renos Stayrakis, a lawyer from Nicosia, Kikis Treppidis, and Dr. Dan Voiculescu of Bucharest, Hotnews reported.
