Dan Voiculescu (politician)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dan Voiculescu (born September 25, 1946 in Bucharest ) is a Romanian politician and businessman. He was Honorary Chairman of the Conservative Party ( Partidul Conservator ) and Vice President of the Romanian Senate .

biography

Dan Voiculescu grew up in Bucharest in modest circumstances. After his military service in 1970 he became an employee of the cement company ICE Vitrocim and its foreign trade director. He is considered a foreign exchange procurer for the regime under Nicolae Ceaușescu .

During the 1989 revolution he was part of the National Salvation Front . After the upheaval, the independent entrepreneur Voiculescu built up the GRIVCO holding , to which a barely manageable network of companies belonged. Critics accuse him of having financed this with assets from the communist secret service Securitate .

In 1991 Dan Voiculescu founded his own party, the Partidul Umanist Român ( Romanian Humanist Party ). This never had a serious chance of attaining greater importance through voting; however, the simultaneously developing media empire Voiculescus made them interesting for the larger parties. From its inception until 2005, Voiculescu was party chairman; since then he has been honorary president. Even after his retirement from party leadership, he is widely regarded as the leading figure in the party, which renamed itself the Conservative Party ( Partidul Conservator ) in 2005 .

In 2001 Voiculescu gave part of his company to his daughters and since then has mainly devoted himself to politics. According to local journalists and foreign observers, Voiculescu is trying to influence political events in Romania primarily through its Antena 1 TV channel .

From 2004 to 2006, the Voiculescu-dominated Conservative Party was a member of the civil government of Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu . In December 2006 she left this government after the coalition partners rejected Voiculescu as deputy prime minister. The reason for this was the findings recently published by the National Council for the Study of the Archives of the Securitate (CNSAS) about the secret service activities of Voiculescu in the Nicolae Ceaușescu era . Voiculescu vehemently denied this spying activity or described it as irrelevant. He took legal action against the allegations, but the Romanian Court of Cassation ultimately confirmed the allegations in March 2011.

Since the Romanian suffrage for parliamentary elections stipulates a five percent threshold, Voiculescu has for several years been pursuing the strategy of entering into list connections with larger parties, for example with the Social Democrats in 2004 and 2008 . In return, he offers the support of his influential media companies in election campaigns. In the parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2008 , he succeeded in entering the Romanian Senate , as its vice-president he was elected at the end of 2008.

Voiculescu was an avowed opponent of the former President Traian Băsescu . In 2007 he unsuccessfully operated its removal. He is considered to be the organizer of the large opposition alliance of social democrats, national liberals and conservatives founded in early 2011 .

Voiculescu's fortune was estimated in October 2010 by the daily newspaper Gândul at the equivalent of 180 million euros. In March 2011, the taz stated 1.5 billion euros. A large part of this comes from public contracts.

prison sentence

On August 8, 2014, the Romanian Court of Appeal in Bucharest sentenced Dan Voiculescu to ten years in prison for money laundering and fraud. In addition, it ordered a ban from office for the time of the prison sentence plus 5 years after serving against him. During this time, he is prohibited from exercising any managerial functions at home or abroad.

Voiculescu was viewed anonymously on March 7, 2007. As of March 30, 2007, the National Anti-Corruption Agency (DNA) began prosecuting money laundering and fraud. Voiculescu had laundered money through his company GRIVCO (formerly Crescent) and fraudulently acquired real estate and land at unusually low prices, which caused the Romanian state damage of around 60 million euros.

Voiculescu and his lawyers managed to delay the process for seven years. From July 3, 2014, he had been under judicial supervision. Immediately after the verdict, Dan Voiculescu was escorted to the Rahova district of Bucharest, where he was serving his sentence. The verdict included the forfeiture of additional assets from Voiculescu.

After serving a third of his sentence, he was released from prison on July 18, 2017 after repeated requests from his lawyers for parole.

Since December 2019 Voiculescu has been on trial again in the so-called "Process of the Revolution". In the trial, the prosecution accuses Voiculescu and Ion Iliescu of having created a kind of “terrorist psychosis” during the revolution of 1989 with “an extensive campaign of disinformation” about forces allegedly loyal to Ceaușescu and subsequently provoked civil war-like conditions in order to “ to create legitimacy in the eyes of the population ”. At this point the dictator couple Ceaușescu had already been disempowered; however, three quarters of the victims of the uprising died in shootings and street fighting at the hands of supposed terrorists. [outdated]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Keno Verseck : Romania's head of state Johannis. The amateur. In: Der Spiegel from March 12, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b Keno Verseck : Trial of the overthrow of the Ceausescu dictatorship. Romania's revolution comes to justice. In: spon.de from December 24, 2019.
  3. ^ Guy Golan: International media communication in a global age . Taylor & Francis, New York 2010. pp. 449-450. ISBN 978-0-41599-900-7
  4. ^ Keno Verseck : Romania . CH Beck, Munich 2007. p. 113. ISBN 978-3-40655-835-1
  5. ^ A b Adina Marina Stefan: Democratization and securitization: the case of Romania . Brill, Leiden 2009. p. 83. ISBN 978-9-00417-739-0
  6. ↑ diepresse.com of September 14, 2007, accessed on March 16, 2011
  7. ^ Solveig Richter, Markus Soldner: The political systems of Eastern Europe. VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010. p. 665. ISBN 978-3-53116-201-0
  8. ↑ Stefania Slavu: The enlargement of the European Union: an analysis of EU accession of Romania . Publishing house Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2008. p. 131. ISBN 978-3-63157-994-7
  9. ↑ a b taz.de of March 12, 2011, accessed on March 16, 2011
  10. ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Supreme Court confirmed: Romania's Vice-Senate Chief was a Securitate spy (1966) ) In: punkto.ro of March 10, 2011.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.punkto.ro
  11. ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Liberals and conservatives form center-right alliance. ) In: punkto.ro of January 5, 2011.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.punkto.ro
  12. ↑ punkto.ro of January 10, 2011, accessed on March 16, 2011
  13. ↑ punkto.ro of October 12, 2010, accessed on March 16, 2011
  14. ↑ punkto.ro of November 15, 2010, accessed on March 16, 2011
  15. ↑ http://www.pna.ro/comunicat.xhtml?id=5173&jftfdi=&jffi=comunicat
  16. ↑ a b Justice premiere: Large parts of Voiculescu's assets are confiscated. ICA lands and stocks confiscated, offshore accounts frozen. In: Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Romania from August 12, 2014
  17. ^ Dan Voiculescu is released on probation. Media Tsar served barely a third of his sentence. In: Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Romania from July 20, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Voiculescu, Dan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian politician and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Bucharest