Tax authority’s decision to evict TV stations from their headquarters ignites political scandal in Romania

Romania’s Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos will go to the Senate on Wednesday, February 17, to answer the senator’s questions related to the tax authority’s decision to evict a local media group from its headquarters, according to Mediafax. The National Fiscal Administration Agency (ANAF) has recently notified the TV stations Antena 1 and Antena 3, both part of Intact group, that they should leave their headquarters by the end of this week. The ANAF is thus enforcing a court decision from August 2014, which allowed the state to confiscate the property which hosts the two TV stations. The decision was issued in a case in which Romanian businessman Dan Voiculescu was sentenced to 10 years in jail for the fraudulent privatization of the Agriculture Research Institute (ICA). The sentence also allowed the state to confiscate some of Voiculescu’s properties to recover the EUR 60 million damage caused by the illegal privatization. The tax authority now owns the properties and tries to capitalize on them. However, ANAF’s decision to evict the two TV stations has triggered a political scandal, as the Antena 3 journalists and several political leaders are accusing the Government of trying to annihilate the two TV stations. The Senate’s President Calin Popescu Tariceanu called on Prime Minister Ciolos to urgently clarify this matter as ANAF is subordinated to the Government. He said that the tax authority’s actions were a “deliberate plan to suspend democracy and annihilate the press”. Liviu Dragnea, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) called ANAF’s actions undemocratic. He claimed that the tax inspectors went to the headquarters of these TV stations and started asking the people there to show their identification papers. “We are very interested in hearing Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos’ answers and explanations related to the way ANAF worked this case and his solutions so that these TV stations don’t get closed,” Dragnea said, according to Mediafax. Ciolos said he would go to the Senate, but that de didn’t have any explanations to give, considering that the tax authority’s director didn’t need the Government’s approval for issuing such a decision. The Prime Minister added that neither he nor the Finance Minister knew anything about ANAF’s eviction notice, which came out of the sudden after the tax authority had failed to do anything about those assets for years, according to Agerpres. ANAF’s eviction notice to Antena 1 and Antena 3 came just days after Ciolos dismissed the tax agency’s president Gelu Stefan Diaconu. Antena 1 is the second biggest TV channel in Romania in terms of audience while Antena 3 is the biggest local news channel in terms of audience. Antena 3, in particular, has been very active in promoting various political parties and personalities and in criticizing others. The channel has been a strong opponent of former President Traian Basescu and was favorable to former Prime Minister Victor Ponta in his campaign for the presidential elections in 2014. Both TV stations are part of the media group founded by Dan Voiculescu.