Radu Mazare II: Smile and Wave, Boys!
When he discovered Madagascar in 2011, Radu Mazare was the three-time mayor of the seaside Romanian city Constanta. He was also a reasonably attractive and adrenaline-crazed bachelor, a notorious party animal accustomed to exotic destinations and a proud representative of the Social Democratic Party (PSD). After his first visit to Madagascar he said that, “People were nice, they weren’t aggressive, violent as they had been in South Africa, Mozambique. (…) I had the feeling that I was a 1930s coloniser, if you’ve seen it in the movies, where the natives were not yet rebellious and hardened. I had the feeling of a coloniser there. People were agreeable, they only wanted to get some money from you, they were solicitous.”
On coming back from his second vacation in Madagascar in 2012, Radu Mazare announced that he had rented out from a local tribe 1,8 hectares of sea coast in a northern gulf for a period of 99 years, allegedly paying 1 euro per square metre. On his return, Mazare also announced he intended to build a complex for water sports lovers there. His dream came true. In November 2016, during a hearing concerning money obtained by the Constanta City Hall for building the Henri Coanda social housing project, Mazare told magistrates at the Supreme Court that he had invested in “approximately two hectares in a touristic area of Madagascar. On the Madagascar land we erected the Mantasaly resort, made up of 16 bungalows on the beach, a restaurant, a bar-lounge, a spa and a shop.”
Since then, Mazare has been prosecuted in several corruption cases, was forced to resign in 2015 after a brief stint in custody, and has been waiting for the resolution of his court cases while practising his beloved water sports. After receiving a suspended sentence of four years in jail in October 2017 in a case with total damages of approximately €114 million, he’s now hoping that this African island will protect him from ever seeing the inside of a jail cell. On Christmas day 2017, the glamorous former mayor of Constanta fled Romania. He had been under a judicial review mandated by the High Court of Cassation and Justice, which required him to show up at the Constanta police according to a surveillance schedule. When he missed his appointment and was contacted by the police, Mazare reported that he was in Madagascar, where he was seeking political asylum. (According to the Romanian Police, ”The judicial review measures in the case of Radu Mazare did not prohibit him from leaving the country, and the Police is unaware of his having trespassed the obligations imposed on him for the entire length of the preventative measure of judicial review”.)
Upon leaving the country, Mazare wrote a five-page letter to his two lawyers and “all the interested authorities in Romania” saying he had decided to seek political asylum because he was “a political target of the parallel state”, and he had “virtually no chance to benefit from fair, independent, objective and impartial justice” in Romania. He added that he would return when Romania developed a “real judicial system”. Mazare also claimed that he had been prosecuted abusively in all the four cases that had been opened to his name in 2017 as a suspect or a defendant, on charges of abuse of office or complicity to abuse of office. He went on to detail the particulars of each case, punctuating his explanations with “No comment!!!”, “Is this justice?!?”, “And still, they charged me again and took me to court. Madness!”, “Typical Romanian justice! One man’s meat is another man’s poison!” He ends triumphantly with, “I could give countless other examples, but there isn’t enough space and time.”
At the beginning of this week, Radu Mazare was joined in Madagascar by his brother, former Senator Alexandru Mazare. His lawyer announced that Alexandru was on holiday and would return to Romania. Coincidentally, Alexandru’s holiday overlapped with a hearing scheduled on January 8th at the High Court of Cassation and Justice in the Henri Coanda social housing project case. In this case, Radu Mazare is on trial together with his brother and businessman Avraham Morgenstern. According to the prosecutors’ indictment, Radu Mazare, in his capacity as mayor of Constanta, had initiated a programme for building modular living spaces in the Henri Coanda Social Campus, approved by the Constanta Local Council at the beginning of 2011. In this context, Avraham Morgenstern allegedly gave Radu Mazare €175,000 so that he would help him win the public tender for building the campus, at the time worth around €10 million. Investigators are claiming that out of the €175,000, €95,000 were transferred in the personal account of Radu Mazare and €80,000 were remitted to his brother, senator Alexandru Mazare, both open at an Israeli bank.
Judges also realised that one of the witnesses that had to be present at the same hearing, Julien Starosta, a former employee of the company involved in the case, was not found in his home, and then found out that he had left the country and started working abroad. The third defendant in the case, businessman Avraham Morgenstern, has been on the missing list from Romania for over 8 months. He was recently caught in Argentina, and Romanian authorities are trying to extradite him.
However, things don’t look rosy for Radu Mazare. The Honorary Consul of Madagascar in Romania, Serge Rameau, has recently explained that, “[Mazare] didn’t come to us to request a visa, he hasn’t even come personally to the embassy. He sent someone, a female friend of his, with a file at the embassy in Rome, to request an expatriation visa. There is no such thing as political asylum in Madagascar!” The official also mentioned that Madagascar has an agreement with France which enables Romania to request Mazare’s extradition. It remains to be seen whether the stunt he pulled in this small African island will be his salvation or his doom. In the meantime, he’s been smiling and waving — just like in the famous eponymous animation.
