Romanian baroque

When I came here in 1998 it was a period when the reformists, the CDR, were in power. I heard many stories about how corrupt the other side, the post-communist PSDR, which renamed itself the PSD, had been in their 6 years in power until 1996. “Nobody can forgive them for what they did”, a friend told me. “Except the electorate.” “Yes, except the electorate.”

The CDR governments made very important and necessary changes but they ran the economy into the ground and the PSD came back to the dismay of all the nice people in Bucharest.

One of them told me that living under the PSD was like living under an army of occupation.

The analogy was a good one. The PSD looted the country with arrogance and made little attempt to hide their depredations.

It was the occupation that began after the war with the liberation, which was no liberation, by the Russians, but the PSD were no longer communists.

In the summer of 1989 leading East European communists came to realise the end of communism needn't be the end of them but a management buyout and the opportunity to make a great deal of money that could be spent in Western capitals. 

This is the story of the National Salvation Front that took power after the revolution, claiming to expunge communism but in fact continuing the communist party in a new form. It became the PDSR and then the PSD. 

Both the main Romanian parties are very corrupt but the National Liberals are thin, more like a debating society. 

The PSD is not a national party so much as a federation of local parties, which replaced the old communist organisation in the counties where they control power and money. 

Romania you have to understand is a feudal system, but one without charming baronial castles and well-bred aristocrats.

In 2003 I said to a lawyer who was sleeping with many of the leading figures in the PSD and consequently was unusually well informed that the party was a form of organized crime, to which she replied accurately enough, "No, it's not, it's disorganised crime."

I used to follow politics very attentively, read the newspaper carefully, found out as much as I could, and knew a lot of stuff. Then my interest moved to other things: Brexit, Donald Trump, the Middle East.

Recently I woke up from what seems like a long sleep. I feel like a Rip Van Winkle who's awakened to see how things have changed in 20 years. And how have they changed? They've changed enormously and yet they haven't changed at all.

The rich men 20 or 25 years ago were slightly absurd figures, badly dressed with dangerously sexy wives. Husbands and wives alike fitted the definition of nouveaux riches: expensively cheap.

Now they're much more sophisticated and they eat microscopic amounts of food at cool venues like Loft. They visit Monaco regularly. 

In fact the Monaco circle is a very powerful circle of highly controversial people. They are mostly in real estate but a few are underworld. One very rich and famous (non--underworld) member of the group is suspected of murdering a potential whistleblower. Several fled Romania to escape prison but came back and remain free. They are respected if not respectable. 

25 years ago the judges were easily bribed but I was told that a call from the Victoria Palace (in other words the seat of the Prime Minister) always overrode any bribe, however large. The judges, in the time of the PDSR, were subordinate to the politicians.

Now the judges seem to be a power centre of their own. There is a very clear link between the judges and the PSD even when the PSD is in opposition, as it is for the time being since it pulled out of the coalition at the behest of Kimberly Guilfoyle, but the judges do not take orders as they used to do from politicians.

The judges are shameless in a way they weren't 25 years ago, when hypocrisy was a tribute that vice paid to virtue. They complain about politicians who  seek to curtail their independence. This is the approved language of the European Union again, which takes the place of the old limba de lemn or wooden language that Communists used to speak.

Lia Savonea, the President of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, which is the supreme court, is the best case in point.

Honest judges complain about trial rigging and the European Chief Prosecutor, who is a Romanian, backs them but Lia is untouched and untouchable. She is the state.

She dismisses accusations of corruption as inventions of centre-right politicians.

Meanwhile she acquitted a notorious alleged underworld figure who faced a 7-year sentence for robbery while she and her husband did a real estate deal with the defendant's uncle

25 years ago judges would issue nonsensical decisions. Criminal files would simply disappear. 

Files still disappear but more common is prolonging trials for so long that the statute of limitations kicks in.

In 2014 Romania introduced a new criminal code. In 2018 the Constitutional Court ruled that Article 155 was not clear about which acts reset the clock and postponed the operation of the statute of limitations and therefore was null.

For four years the Romanian Parliament did nothing about it.

In 2022 the Constitutional Court ruled that there were no grounds for interrupting the statute of limitations during those four years. In effect it ruled that the clock had been ticking silently since the date of the alleged crime.

Nearly 10,000 criminal cases, indictments, and active convictions vanished. All sorts of high-profile people received a get-out-of-jail-free card, like in Monopoly.

This epitaph in an English churchyard comes to mind: "I wasted time and now doth time waste me."

The solution clearly is to abolish the statute of limitations and to replace the judges with new judges. Neither of these two things is going to happen.

It is not true that nothing can be done because it has been done in Albania and Moldova. In these countries a hostile takeover of the judiciary took place in which auditors from abroad investigated the wealth of the judges and very many were thrown out.

But Albania and Moldova have the advantage over Romania that they're not in the European Union and want to get in and have therefore to do their best to impress Brussels. 

Romania is in the European Union and is at ease in Zion.

Compliance is the name of the game and instead of civil servants being men in crumpled crimplene suits making $100 officially from their salary we have better though still badly paid people who speak the language that the European Union likes and, like rabbits illuminated by car headlights, are absolutely terrified of being accused of corruption.

As ever in Romania, it's baroque: the triumph of form over substance.

I was told that after the PSD left office in 2004 and the so-called centre-right took power, bribery became much less in the civil service. People still wanted bribes but they were frightened of receiving them and they didn't intend to do anything without a bribe so nothing got done.

In fact as we now know, although it wasn't necessarily apparent at the time, the old system carried on, but in a diminished form, under the centre-right government.

It is difficult to say whether Romania has gained more or lost more from being in the European Union. Probably, on balance, it has lost more because the free movement of people has meant millions of Romanians have left Romania to be replaced, in the case of workers, by badly paid third-world immigrants.

Undoubtedly living standards have risen a lot since Romania joined the European Union and to some extent it's because of European Union subsidies and investments. But prices rose enormously and foreign companies ate the Romanian market. 

The investments tend to favour certain groups, particularly, of course, the rich, but also the university graduates in the cities, and a very large amount of the European money is stolen in clever ways. 

The PSD have become very much more sophisticated. Their children are educated at Ivy League universities.

As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, there are two kinds of cynicism: the cynicism of the young which is unattractive and the cynicism of the old of which he approved. Employing the latter is a very useful exercise. 

Viewed cynically the European Union is as corrupt as Romania but it's corrupt in a much more sophisticated way and the Romanians are becoming sophisticated too.

I am an Englishman who left as Tony Blair started and looking at Romanian corruption from an English pre-Blair point of view it seems terribly shocking but if I were a Frenchman or an Italian, it would not. Nor from an American point of view.

The most interesting aspect of the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal - the latest development - is that she asked for €100,000 to give access to the Trump White House. How very, very Romanian it seems, say Romanians disappointedly. In fact Romanians are less amateur than Kimberly, who accepts cards. 

The corruption in America, which was always extreme, is now much worse, it seems, than the corruption in Romania.  Think of Jared Kushner receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from MBS in return for what seems like nothing at all. Think of Kushner's father, who was convicted and sent to prison for blackmail, being pardoned and made the U.S. ambassador to France, which he lectures about anti-Semitism.