White Thread goes global

Walking down Calea Victoriei I keep my gaze firmly on the ground in order to keep myself from falling over one of the innumerable sunken and dislodged paving stones. This is the main street in a European capital and it wasn't like this under Communism or until the city centre was repaved by a firm owned by a close associate of President Basescu who won office promising to fight corruption. The president of the company was arrested in 2014 but the case continues in the courts.

Twenty-five years ago today America received the sort of blow they so often inflict on other countries and a not brave but frightened new world was born.

It was the start of the surveillance state, the Panopticon in which we all live.

Surveillance is everywhere. Drones are important but equally so is the modern compliance apparatus.

In Romania there is a wonderfully evocative phrase for a poorly disguised lie: they say it is cusut cu ață albă—“sewn with a white thread.” It describes a deception so glaringly obvious that it makes no real effort to hide its own fabrication.

This habit has metastasised and spread.

The Romanian concept of something being "sewn with white thread" (cusut cu ață albă) refers to a legal or administrative fiction so transparent that its deception is obvious to everyone involved. Crucially, it is not meant to fool anyone; rather, it serves as a mutually accepted, structurally compliant pretext. The speaker knows it is a lie, the listener knows it is a lie, but both parties respect the "form" of the statement because it satisfies a bureaucratic requirement and allows a desired outcome to proceed.

In the Romanian legal tradition, this manifests as the triumph of form over substance (forma bate fondul). A public tender or corporate transaction can be heavily rigged in substance, but if the paperwork ticks every statutory box the "white thread" holds and the contract or action is legally unassailable.

This is how agile Romanian lawyers secure massive victories that cost the Romanian state hundreds of millions a year in procurement disputes. They use EU procurement law to turn the Romanian bureaucracy into a weapon against itself. They take a delight in using the law to defeat the purposes for which it was enacted. Of course they do. That is their job.

This hyper-formalistic approach has expanded globally, defining the modern era of international compliance and data governance.

Legal and prioritise workplace transparency, exhaustive tracking rules are introduced to log every digital interaction, keystroke, and performance metric. But the true intent is not transparency. 

It is the ultimate manifestation of the "white thread": a system that purports to expose everything, but is carefully curated to obscure the true, ruthless intentions of the corporation. The historian Nicolae Iorga said it is impossible to lose one's reputation in Romania. So it proves for many big international companies.

Lawyer Patricia Osmani Kovacevic, a product of spy and informer ridden Communist Romania, is now an exponent and skilled practitioner of compliance in the USA. She stresses in talks she gives the importance of exhaustive ethically unassailable compliance in a flat monotone that has an almost hypnotic effect but her audience breaks the code. She is teaching them how compliance will empower CEOs and Legal Directors to treat the regulations like a chess game, create a firewall around them and give them a very powerful weapon against regulators, competitors and employees. 

Transparency used to produce opacity.


Pure white thread.

You have the disastrous effects of straightforward old-fashioned corruption and you have the disastrous effects of the procurement law industry.

As the Edwardian song goes: 'It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.'"

The psychologist Eric Berne in his Games People Play defined a psychological 'game' as a recurring series of social interactions with a hidden, ulterior motive, usually marching toward a predictable outcome. The modern compliance apparatus aims for predictability too. Compliance rules are games too, of often devilish complexity, devilish being an apposite word.

Public procurement laws have not been around very long in the west and, of course, less time in Romania. 

The perilous state of the historic centre of Bucharest, and I do mean perilous, proves how ineffective they are.

They serve no purpose, they make bad worse in fact, and they should be abolished.