Adrian Nastase’s Political Suicide

No rock star goes down easily. Especially when he holds illusions of grandeur as glamorous as those of Adrian Nastase. The former prime minister, deputy and Social Democrat Party (PSD) leader may have missed his chance at the Presidency, but he was surely determined to get there. So much so that he gambled his freedom for it and lost.
Before he was investigated and cleared in the Aunt Tamara case for granting a public office position to an official who had warned him about and promised to close an ongoing money laundering case regarding his wife, Adrian Nastase was under investigation in two other corruption cases: the Zambaccian and the Quality Trophy case. All three involved some variation of bribery — with the politician both on the giving and the receiving end –, blackmail, influence peddling, and money laundering.
Zambaccian — the name of the street of one of Nastase’s houses — was, if not a straightforward, at least a less tortuous case. In it, Nastase was convicted to four years in jail for having illegally received 500,000 EUR from Irina Jianu to re-appoint her as head of the State Inspectorate for Civil Engineering (ISC). The bribe took a particularly long way to get home — Jianu’s company sponsored the renovation of one of Nastase’ houses with materials from China by paying their customs duties and transportation inside Romania. Another 700,000 EUR was used by the same company to buy the materials. The money had been “left out” of Nastase’s official declaration of assets, and had been given to Jianu by a third-party affiliated with the Nastases, and thus entered the legal financial circuit.
The Quality Trophy case
The Quality Trophy was, in fact, the first of the three investigations into Nastase’s activities and was a gigantic corruption case that processed almost 1,000 witnesses. It was closed on June 19th, 2012, after three years of investigations that were routinely stalled by procedural tricks pulled by the defendant. Nastase went so far as to claim that “I am the trophy in the Quality Trophy”, because he believed that he had been unfairly sentenced and that the case had been politically motivated, as an act of revenge by former president Traian Basescu, who he had faced and lost to in the 2004 presidential race.
In this case, Nastase was sentenced to two years in jail, which the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA). He was convicted for having used his influence as the PSD leader to obtain money and other benefits for his personal gain, specifically to raise funds for his presidential electoral campaign in 2004. The other five defendants were two inspectors at the ISC, the managing partner of a private typography and the married owners of several private firms. All of them got verdicts that were supplemented with an extra year of jail time. Adrian Nastase and the other defendants also had to pay a 1,45-million-euro compensation to ISC.
Quality fraud
In 2004, the ISC, managed by the previously mentioned Irina Jianu, held a symposium called “The Quality Trophy in Civil Engineering”. The event was used to raise funds for Nastase’s presidential campaigns through extortionate participation fees — 5,000 RON for individuals and 15,000 RON for companies. For instance, PSD members with significant positions at public institutions (The National Consumer Protection Agency, The ROMSILVA National Forest Administration, The National Veterinary Agency, The National Lignite Company, The Turceni Energy Complex, The National Society for Land Improvement), local party leaders, mayors and county council presidents had to pay to participate in a symposium that was irrelevant to their activity. Other civil engineering firms were also compelled to participate because they were invited and invoiced by the same institutions that granted them the necessary permits to carry out their business.
Participation fees amounted to a total of 6,746,397 RON that should have been added to the budget of ISC, a public institution. However, the money was collected by companies owned by Bogdan and Marina Popovici, two of the defendants in the case. The companies involved in organising the event collected the participation fees and subcontracted the implementation of the event to another company that was also controlled by the same two people, and which failed to deliver the services it had been “contracted” to deliver, so as to keep as much of the funds as possible. The defendants then proceeded to conceal the provenance of these funds through money laundering operations. Most of the money was transferred into the account of a company owned by Vasile Mihail Cristian, another defendant in the case. He paid two-thirds for Nastase’s campaign materials. He also drew up false documents, false commercial and financial documents in order to justify the money. Nastase received funds in the same way from a company owned by Irina Paula Jianu for other electoral materials and other campaign spending.
Posh to the end

To prove his point about his innocence, Nastase went further than words and took justice into his own hands. Hours after receiving his jail sentence, when policemen came to pick him up and take him to a penitentiary, Nastase tried to commit suicide with a 9 mm Smith & Weston revolver, one of the most popular guns in the world. He suffered a superficial wound to the neck and was taken to the ICU, where he was operated on and put under surveillance. An entire country woke up early on June 20th, 2012 to pictures of him carried on a gurney, eyes wide open, and his alleged gunshot wounds taped carefully with a Burberry scarf. An acte manqué for sure, since this couldn’t have inspired compassion in the average Romanian, whose wage is 3 times lower than the price of that scarf.
Then again, it’s a nice scarf to wave goodbye with. Especially to a criminal as slick as Adrian Nastase.

