Gheorghe Copos — Football club owner, senator and jailbird
If you take a close look at the Forbes list of Romania’s richest people you might be surprised to notice two things. One, that many of the country’s rich and famous — some of whom are politicians — are conspicuously absent. The second is that a surprising number of Romania’s well to do are under investigation for corruption and fraud charges. It seems that, while political elites and business elites often join hands in committing economic crimes, it is only the business elites that flaunt their wealth. And, more often than not, when an outspokenly wealthy politician is indicted, he just so happens to also be a businessman.
Case in point is Gheorghe Copos. He has long been among Romania’s home-grown plutocrats, more specifically of that particular breed that also moonlights as football club owners. Indeed, in Copos’ case, it was football that would be his downfall.
Copos has a checkered past under Romania’s ancien regime, throughout the savage nineties and well into Romania’s European noughties. Born in the northwest of the country but educated in Bucharest as a party cadre at Communist Romania’s top political university, the Ștefan Gheorghiu Academy, before 1989 Copos was a member of the Communist Youth and a rising star in the party. Surviving and thriving before the fall of Communism was more often than not about whom you knew than what you knew and who you were. As a result, the skills that aspiring politicians and ‘fixers’ acquired often translated quite well to the post-communist political and economic climate. With the fall of Ceușescu and the slow but steady drift towards capitalism, Copos reinvented himself in the nineties as an astute businessman. His business empire started, first in the white goods and consumer electronics sector. With Ana Electronic Copos “made his first million dollars” before setting his sights on two other nineties growth industries, the baked goods trade and the hotel industry. As far back as 2007, Copos’ wealth numbered in the hundreds of millions dollars — although the exact number is a matter of contention: Forbes estimated it at $210 million, while investigative journalists claimed it revolved around the $700 million mark. In 2013 Copos himself would claim that he had lost €700 million throughout the years that he had been on trial.
Business did not keep Copos from pursuing his youth dream of becoming a politician, even if he did it under a capitalist, not a communist regime. In 2004 Copos became a politician in the Romanian Conservative Party (PC) and was even a state minister for business development, a job he famously quit when several of his tax code amendments were turned down by then Prime-Minister Călin Popescu Tăriceanu. Copos finished out his term as Senator in 2008, with not a single legislative initiative or amendment on record.
However, like other Romanian millionaires, Copos had a soft spot not just for politics but also for publicity, more specifically the publicity that came with owning a football team. In 1993, just three years into his business career, Copos became the majority shareholder of FC Rapid Bucharest, a team he would lead to victory in Romania’s top-flight league twice. But Rapid was not just a spur of the moment investment for Copos. Instead it turned into a money-making racket quite quickly with the help of some creative accounting.
Indeed, the so call “Football Transfers Affair” was a simple but lucrative racket set up by several club owners and football impresarios in order to make (more) money off inter-club player transfers. The setup was quite simple — players that would be traded to other clubs, both domestically and abroad would be listed al less than half the price of the transfer and the impresarios and club owners would split the difference. The state would get considerably less tax revenue and the brunt of the financial damage would fall to the clubs. The total prejudice to the state between 1999 and 2005 is estimated at $1.5 million while the total cumulative prejudice to Romanian football clubs is estimated at $10 million dollars. Copos was one of the ringleaders of the Transfers circuit and on the 4th of March 2014 he received a final sentence of 3 years and 8 months for tax evasion, fraud and money laundering — he was also served with a $700,000 tax bill.
But that was just the beginning of his troubles. That same month, on the 26th, Copos received a second sentencing in the “Lottery I” Case. Both the Lottery I and Lottery II cases showcased Copos as the ringleader in schemes for defrauding the state or private companies. Yet while the Lottery II case was a complex scheme of market manipulation, fictitious capital claims and shell companies that was very hard to prove and one that Copos and his partners would eventually walk away unscathed from, Lottery I was a much simpler affair. Copos’ failing Ana Electronics company, the one that had made him his first million, sold 38 of its locations at undervalued prices to third party individuals before passing them on to the Romanian Lottery at ten times the original sale price. The final price for the sale was $5.2 million but due to the intermediaries that Copos used, the state only got $78000 in tax instead of the over one million owed. Copos’ penchant for tax evasion did not go unnoticed, and in August of 2014 he was sentenced to 4 years in prison in the court of last appeal.
But while the odds were against him, Copos still came out on top. In 2015 after a year and a month in prison, the courts granted Copos parole, citing the businessman-turned-politician’s good behaviour and diligent academic work (he wrote five books, including an allegedly plagiarised, allegedly ghost-written study that shaved off precious prison time). It seems that even when the odds were against him, Copos — with a little help from the Romanian deep state — found a way to turn them to his advantage.
