Daniel Dragomir: Wagging a Guilty Finger at the DNA
One would believe “secret” to be the operational word for a Secret Service employee. One would also think that when intelligence agencies’ top recruits do emerge into the spotlight, something is very wrong indeed. This is exactly what happened in Romania in one notable case in which confidentiality, discretion and ethics were thrown to the wind.
Daniel Dragomir, a lieutenant-colonel at the Romanian Domestic Intelligence Agency (SRI) and the head of the Counter-Terrorism Brigade from 2012 to 2013, has been prosecuted by the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) in 2 corruption cases. In the first one, he used his influence to keep a tax-evading businessman out of jail, in exchange for bribes. In the second case, he hired Black Cube, a private, foreign intelligence agency at the request of several businessmen in order to spy on the head of the DNA, Laura Codruta Kovesi. Now awaiting his verdict in his second case, former SRI officer Dragomir seems to be fighting his potential conviction in cahoots with other corrupt Romanian businessmen bent on evading the law. He is taking a prominent role in the concerted PR attack targeting the Romanian justice system and the DNA.
Slaying the dragon
In late January 2018, Daniel Dragomir posted on Facebook (where he counts on a cultish, if not particularly numerous fanbase) that he was going to take part in an event exposing “the current state of the justice system in Romania, the biggest fake news of the past years in Romania and Europe: Laura Codruta Kovesi, the illegal and unconstitutional relationship between Coldea [a former SRI official] and Kovesi”, as well as “justice in Romania, the contemporary Inquisition”.
On January 24th, 2018, Daniel Dragomir participated in a press conference at the Brussels Press House, publicly denouncing Romanian justice as corrupt and abusive. He presented his “ordeal” at the hands of the DNA with the support of Human Rights Without Frontiers (a shady self-described fundamental rights agency) and of two other regular defenders of corrupt Eastern European criminals: Willy Fautré and David Clarke. (The full recording is available here.) To give his rants more substance and a veneer of respectability, in December 2017, Dragmir also founded the Romania 3.0 civic initiative. This ad-hoc online platform stands for a wide array of political initiatives that would supposedly “straighten out” the unfair, “Soviet-style” Romanian justice system and limit the power of the secret services.
The power of the secret services
Dragomir is no stranger to the influence wielded by secret services in Romania, which he is well versed in using to his advantage. The former officer, who in 2013 asked to be put on the SRI reserve list, was sent to court by the DNA in 2015 for influence peddling and money laundering. In 2012, Dragomir began collaborating with Rami Ghaziri — a French-Lebanese millionaire who administered Avicola Crevedia, a large chicken and egg-producing company controlled by a Lebanese holding. In November 2014, when Ghaziri was placed into custody for tax evasion, illegal VAT returns and illegal exports of foreign currency from Avicola, Ghaziri told the prosecutors that the former SRI officer had paid Dragomir and his wife more than €460,000 so that the latter would prevent certain tax audits and obtain undue, speedy VAT reimbursements for him.
Prosecutors mentioned in their indictment that between October 2012-February 2013 Dragomir had “directly and personally used the classified data and information that he had obtained as a SRI officer […] with the illegal purpose — planned and achieved — of obtaining amounts of money and other undue benefits, and had given the denouncing witness access to data that referred to the criminal activity carried out by him and the group of firms belonging to him”. The money was then laundered and split with other accomplices, such as Angela Nicolae, the lead prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office who had also helped and protected Ghaziri and who was sent to court around the same time.
The kids are alright
Upset that the DNA was coming after him, Dragomir stepped up his game. According to the prosecutors, in 2016, he contacted Black Cube, an Israeli intelligence company tied to the Mossad, to obtain compromising information on Kovesi and people close to her, paying them €1.2 million on behalf of several others, including one of our more faithful readers, Alexander Adamescu. In the spring of 2016, Black Cube collaborators broke into email accounts belonging to Kovesi and family, and phoned people close to her to threaten them into telling them confidential information about the anti-corruption officer. Dragomir was in jail for a year, where he claims to have been placed in a maximum security penitentiary, in isolation, and to have “sat in the bed where [Dan] Adamescu had lain in, when he was locked up. My connection with Adamescu is the fact that I lay in his bed, when he faced these tragic conditions.”
However, there seem to be at least two other connections between Dragomir and the convicted, late millionaire Adamescu Sr. One: that Adamescu’s newspaper, “Romania Libera”, has reported most extensively on Dragomir’s case, and that its tone with regards to the former officer has shifted from neutral in 2015–2016, to utterly sympathetic in 2018. Two: that Dragomir’s fight against the DNA and Romanian justice is stoking the fire of rich and corrupt Romanians using PR to escape the long hand of justice, such as Sebastian Ghita, Puiu Popoviciu or Alexander Adamescu, the son of Dan Adamescu, who is currently fighting against a European Arrest Warrant issued in his name for bribing judges. (Interestingly enough, at the January 24th conference, Dragomir also railed against European Arrest Warrants, whose supposed “abuse” places Romania “alongside Turkey and the Russian Federation [and] is an abusive policy of hounding its political opponents”).
Dragomir and his friends will certainly continue hurling abuse at DNA and Romanian justice, while posing as martyrs of the system. They have too much to lose no to. However, we can only hope that deeds will prevail over lies, and that their lies will ultimately be exposed for what they are: a smokescreen put up by criminals struggling to stay afloat.
