Dan Voiculescu: Komodo Dragons Always Fall On Their Feet
Nicknames are a matter of pride for criminals. Whether they earn their nom de guerre thanks to their skills or physical and temperamental particularities, or they grow to fit them in time, they nevertheless use them to gloat about their special worth. Few aliases given to corrupt Romanian politicians have been as apt as “The Komodo dragon” was for Dan Voiculescu. In his own words, “[the Komodo dragon] is a very strong animal, which has two livers, and which, no matter how you throw it, how you place it, knows how to fall, he ends up back on his belly. He’s a very big and strong crocodile.”
Throughout his life, Voiculescu has repeatedly shown that he knows how to fall in order to survive the fall. A politician, businessman, university professor and media mogul, he is one of the wealthiest Romanians alive, with an official fortune estimated at €600–650 million in 2012. He started off in a family of modest means made up of a plumber father and a housewife mother, and worked his way up under the Communist regime by working at foreign commerce companies where, codenamed as “Felix”, he spied on foreign citizens for the Securitate. Ironically, a decade later he himself was put under surveillance by the Securitate due to the luxurious lifestyle he was leading and because of the unauthorised meetings he had with foreign citizens during his trips abroad.
After the Revolution, he taught for 8 years at the Bucharest Economic Studies University and became a member of the Romanian Academy. At the same time, he founded Grivco Holding, a group made up of over 20 companies active in commerce, media, production, services, finance, agriculture, and the Romanian Humanist Party (PUR), which in 2005 changed its name to the Conservative Party (PC). Within 6 years after the fall of Communism, Voiculescu made his first million euros: 40% from Grivco and 60% from one of the companies in the group, Intact Media Group, one of the most important and profitable Romanian media conglomerates. It numbers 6 TV channels (the Antena TV channels), two radio stations, 8 publications, a printing house, and a charitable foundation.
In 2006, a short time before the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) began its prosecution of Dan Voiculescu for corruption, he donated all the shares he owned in the group of firms he had founded to his two daughters, thus withdrawing from business and switching to politics. He became a Bucharest senator for the first time in 2004, and resigned in the last year of his term, allegedly due to a lack of support in the Parliament for the projects promoted by the Conservative Party which he represented, such as a tax exemption for reinvested profits or the extension of renting contracts for people living in nationalised homes. His resignation caused his corruption cases to be moved from the High Court of Cassation and Justice to the Bucharest Court. He pulled the exact same manoeuvre in his two ensuing terms, forcing the courts to finally transfer his cases to the Bucharest Court.
The case the Komodo dragon was being investigated for, and for which he was eventually convicted to 10 years in jail, was not your run-of-the-mill corruption case. The ICA case was one of the most important corruption cases in the legal history of post-Communist Romania. In numbers, the trial took 2,073 days, circulated between three courts, registered 71 hearings, had 13 magistrates ruling on the case, 13 defendants (out of 27 suspects) were sent to court, 1 of the defendants died during the investigation, and the defendants collectively received 67 years in jail in total from the Bucharest Court of Appeal.
Dan Voiculescu and 13 others were accused of having orchestrated the fraudulent privatization of the state-owned Food Research Institute (ICA) and that Grivco Holdings had bought, with a little over €100.000, over 3.5 hectares of land that belonged to the Institute, therefore to the state. The damages were in excess of €60 million. A small part of it was recovered by impounding Voiculescu’s assets and bank accounts, including the Antena Group offices.
Maybe this is what led then-CEO of Antena Group, Sorin Alexandrescu, to blackmail the administrator of RCS&RDS, a leading telecommunications company, from 2013 to 2017. Alexandrescu threatened the administrator that, if he didn’t accept the revision of the contract for relaying Antena TV channels and introduce clauses favourable to his company, he would use the channels to launch a denigration campaign targeted at him. After the RCS&RDS administrator refused, the threats came true, with the complicity of other people in the group’s top management. After RCS&RDS denounced the blackmail, Dan Voiculescu and one of his daughters, Camelia Voiculescu, were accused of complicity to blackmail, Alexandrescu was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in jail, while Antena TV Group was fined 200.000 lei (40.112 GBP).
But that didn’t stop the dragon Voiculescu from ending “back on his belly”. He served less than 3 years of his sentence before being conditionally released in July 2017. The court motivated its decision based on several grounds. One of them was the inmate’s “respectful behaviour towards the jail’s staff” and the community work he carried out, in total the equivalent of 387 days of detention. While broom sweeping the prison grounds, he also wrote, on average, a book every month. According to Romanian laws, inmates get a reduction equivalent to 30 days in prison for every book they write in the penitentiary. In Voiculescu’s case, the 11 books he supposedly produced shaved 330 days off his sentence. At the same time, because he is over 60 and his sentence does not exceed 10 years, according to the law, Voiculescu can execute only a third of his sentence.
For the Romanian state, there is no happy ending to this story. Every time it seems as if the Komodo dragon has finally caved, it turns out he has one more trick up his sleeve. Then again, the future may hold surprises. Even Komodo dragons bow down to bigger predators.
