Romanian senator, former minister get jail sentences in Rompetrol refinery stock manipulation

The Bucharest Appeal Court recently sentenced Romanian journalist and senator Sorin Rosca Stanescu to two years and four months in jail, no parole, in the Rompetrol case, one of the most high profile trials in Romania. Former communications minister Sorin Pantis was also sentenced to two years and eight months in jail. The two were found guilty of use of privileged information, stock market manipulation and for setting up an organized crime group in the listing Bucharest Stock Exchange of Rompetrol Rafinare, the company which controls the Petromidia refinery, back in April 2004. The main person indicted in this case was the now late Romanian businessman Dinu Patriciu, the former owner of the Rompetrol group, who orchestrated the stock market listing. Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year jail sentence for Patriciu, who was indicted for several charges, including embezzlement, money laundering, stock market manipulation and setting up an organized crime group. Patriciu died at the end of August this year, at the age of 64, so he never got to be convicted. The trial went on for his accomplices and many of them got final jail sentences, on Tuesday, October 7, 2014. Alexandru Bucsa, the former administrator and financial director of Rompetrol at the time of the crimes, got the heaviest sentence in this case - six years in jail. He was found guilty for complicity to embezzlement, complicity to money laundering, and setting up an organized crime group. A former director in the Finance Ministry, Petrica Grama, was also convicted to two years and four months in jail for accessory to embezzlement in this case. Bucsa and Grama also have to pay some USD 58 million in damages to the Romanian state. Florin Iulian Aldea and Claudiu Simulescu, two of Patriciu’s stock brokers, were also convicted to five years and four years in jail, no parole, for accessory to capital market manipulation. The two brokers made the transactions by which Patriciu sold a large number of Rompetrol Rafinare shares on April 7, 2004, when the company was listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. More than 2 billion Rompetrol Rafinare shares were traded on that day, some of them for prices as low as RON 0.0116 per share, while the closing price for the shares was more than triple, at RON 0.04 per share. Some of Patriciu’s friends, including some Romanian politicians, bought Rompetrol Rafinare shares that day at very low prices only to sell them later for large profits. Officials of the former capital market supervisory authority CNVM were also indicted in this case for accessory to capital market manipulation, as they closed eyes to these transactions. Among them, Gabriela Anghelache, former president of CNVM, Paul Miclaus and Victor Eros, former members of CNVM’s board, as well as some CNVM directors. They all got jail sentences with parole.