Compensations for land confiscated by communists in Romania inflated by EUR 360 mln

The sums paid to people who asked for compensations for land plots confiscated by the communist regime were some EUR 356 million higher than the actual value of these land plots, the National Authority for Property Restitution (ANRP) told local G4Media.ro.

This number covers only 190 properties for which the ANRP approved compensations between 2007 and 2011.

According to ANRP, the Court of Auditors asked the authority in 2013 to reevaluate the properties and reassess the compensations paid between 2007 and 2011, under suspicion of fraud.

In 2017, ANRP checked 1,079 valuation reports made between 2009 and 2011 and found that 819 of them didn’t comply with international valuation standards. In 190 of these reports, the properties subject to compensation were overvalued by a total sum of RON 1.72 billion (EUR 356 mln), according to ANRP’s current president George Baesu. For the other 569 non-compliant reports, the reevaluation reports haven’t been completed yet, so the final number could be even higher.

The compensation of properties confiscated by the communist regime has been one of the biggest schemes to drain money from the state, especially in the last 20 years. Romania decided that those who couldn’t recover their properties after the fall of the communist regime should be compensated in full. However, in many cases, the compensations didn’t reach the people entitled to them (former owners of their heirs) but intermediaries (lawyers, brokers, businessmen) who bought the litigious rights for those properties.

In many cases, these intermediaries, who also had strong political connections, managed to get large compensations from the ANRP (whose board members were also politically appointed), based on inflated valuations. For example, in 2011, the ANRP approved a compensation of RON 377 million (EUR 80 mln) for a 13-hectare land plot at Bucharest’s outskirts. In November 2014, the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) arrested the former ANRP president who approved this compensation and announced that the land plot was overvalued by EUR 62.5 mln.

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