Neculai Ontanu: the bricklayer who would be mayor
For the people of Bucharest, General Neculai Ontanu is a household name. The four-term mayor of the 2nd district of the city, Ontanu lorded over a 32 sq km swathe of land with an iron hand between 2000 and 2016 — that is, until the Romanian Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) put a stop to his reign. Forced to resign after being accused of illegally pocketing a slice of prime real estate in exchange for the preferential retrocession of 83,500 sq meters of land, Ontanu was finally brought before justice in 2016…only to duck away in 2017 after the charge’s statute of limitations lapsed.
Who is Neculai Ontanu?
The story of Bucharest’s longest serving mayor begins in the late 1990s, when a lowly bricklayer going by name of Neculai Ontanu was inexplicably catapulted to the cushy job of advisor to the City Hall. After a four year stint, our hero is democratically elected as mayor of the 2nd district of Bucharest. He maintains a low profile for the first few years, earning a good reputation with his constituents for the municipal parties (read, free food and booze) hosted in the district’s public parks, which became a staple of his four terms. At one point, his office was spending a whopping 33 million euros every year for such “social-cultural actions”
But while the good people of the 2nd district were kept entertained by the generous cookouts organized by city hall, our hero was hard at work cajoling and coaxing the strongmen of the day to bump him up the military ladder. Indeed, Ontanu is not your ordinary bricklayer, but is instead a hard-nosed political operative schooled in the 1980s with a knack for the military. Some have even claimed his political career was due to his connections with the hated Securitate of the Ceausescu era. Armed with slyness and a very flexible set of political principles, Ontanu managed to curry favor with every Romanian government of the past 16 years, irrespective of their political colors.
Other than pledging his public support to the Prime Minister du jour, Ontanu also helped some obtain highly lucrative plots of land in swanky areas of Bucharest. And in exchange for his unwavering support, successive governments have been showering the former bricklayer with military titles, who managed to climb all the way to his current rank of 2-star general. Needless to say that Ontanu has never seen a day of combat, and the most dangerous situation he was probably in involved driving to and fro work on the notoriously potholed roads of the 2nd district.
Nevertheless, once ennobled, Ontanu quickly proceeded to put his extensive military training to good use, and set up what is perhaps the only private army in Bucharest paid for with public funds. Under the guise of improving the disaster response time of local authorities, Ontanu created a 1000-strong paramilitary group of volunteers endowed with Humvees and trained by former members of the intelligence community.
But much like the ancient Greeks who wanted too much only to fall splat to the ground, Ontanu’s reckoning came sooner than expected.
How do you spell hubris?
On June 16th, 2016, Romanian prosecutors arrested Neculai Ontanu, alongside 3 of his associates (Loredana Radu, Aurel Radu and Toma Sutru), and charged them with graft, a crime carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Ontanu was accused of asking for a plot of land of 1,500 sq meters — worth 1.4 million euros — in exchange for interceding in a retrocession case back in 2007. In order to cover the tracks of this illicit transaction, Ontanu used his associates to create a fake paper trail. According to the prosecutors, at Ontanu’s request, the plot of land was donated (read, for free) by the recipient of the retrocession to Loredana Radu and Aurel Radu. But this is where it gets complicated. A slice of that 1,500 sq meter property was transferred to one Gabriel Oprea. A fellow (five star) general, Oprea was not just then-Romania’s Interior Minister, but also a close friend of the mayor and the head of the party that counted Ontanu as one of its shining stars.
In exchange for the plot of land, Ontanu awarded a parcel worth tens of millions of euros in the Colentina borough to a group of mobsters dubbed “the Monaco Group” named after their favorite meeting place and featuring some of the richest real estate developers, politicians and oligarchs in the country: the Schwartzenberg brothers, Radu Mazare, Bogdan Buzaianu, the Paunescu brothers, Puiu Popoviciu, Adriean Videanu, Bebe Ionescu, Dan Adamescu, Radu Dimofte, Rares Manescu, Sorin Blejnar and Codrut Marta.
Through a series of deals, in 2006 Fabian Schwartzenberg became the sole inheritor of Tudor Ionescu, a 78 year old man claiming his family used to own the land on which parts of the Colentina borough were built. The catch? Even if Ionescu never owned the rights to that plot of land, and even the legal department of the city hall warned Ontanu that the heir has no clam to the area, our 2-star general went ahead and awarded Schwartzenberg — as sole inheritor — the rights to the 83,000 square meter parcel.
People like Schwartzenberg abused a system that was put in place to right a historic wrong. Like most landowners, Ionescu’s family was stripped of its rights when the Romanian Communist Party came to power in the late 1940s, a fact that the Romanian government sought to correct by passing law №10/2001. Since, tens of thousands of people have used it to gain back their dispossessed goods — as did thousands of so-called fake inheritors popped up with doctored papers. The Monaco Group was the most successful representative of the latter bunch. With the help of local officials, the Monaco Group got ownership of countless plots of land in prime real estate locations of Bucharest.
Schwartzenberg sold the plot of land for 10 times less than its market value to Loredana Radu, which then got Ontanu to approve the building of a 10-story hotel on it. Through a series of transactions, Radu transfers the property to Gabriel Oprea, who started building the aforementioned hotel. Construction grinds to a halt with the arrival of DNA prosecutors.
And then Ontanu walked
Disclaimer: this is not a happy story, nor does our hero meet the fate he deserved. For reasons unknown, DNA prosecutors only opened this case a full decade after the transactions and retrocessions took place, giving Ontanu’s lawyers time to invoke the statute of limitations linked to graft cases. After a trial that lasted for a year and saw Ontanu’s tenure as mayor of district 2 end, DNA prosecutors are expected to dismiss all charges on July 14th 2017. The revolving door of Romanian politics, where the corrupt and the powerful are one and the same, will most likely help Ontanu recover after this scandal. There’s no reason to believe that our 2-star general won’t run — and win — the coveted spot of mayor of the 2nd district, where his popularity has been barely scratched by the DNA’s allegations. Who said crime doesn’t pay?
