The cheating state

On the 2nd of March 2008, actress Julieta Szonyi and baritone Dan Iordachescu have been the guests of Zig-Zag with Ion Cristoiu on Antena 3. They weren’t invited to discuss about their artistic performances or about their future projects, but to talk about their recent problems.

On the 2nd of March 2008, actress Julieta Szonyi and baritone Dan Iordachescu have been the guests of Zig-Zag with Ion Cristoiu on Antena 3. They weren’t invited to discuss about their artistic performances or about their future projects, but to talk about their recent problems.

Together with other inhabitants of the block at no. 222 on Traian Street in Bucharest they bought their apartments in the terms of Law no. 112 in 1995. The law allows the tenants to buy the apartments from the state if their former owners don’t request them. George Manu, the descendant of the former owner of the block obtained the land and the apartments that hadn’t been sold from the Bucharest City Hall. George Manu asked for compensations in exchange for the already sold apartments. George Manu died in 2005 and his daughters decided they wanted the entire block. Even though they had obtained a few apartments in which they could have lived and partied together with other families, they started the procedures for the apartments that had been bought already.

This is how they got to a lawsuit that combines absurdity with misery. The Court has to decide which of the two types of property is the right one: the type of the ones that bought the apartments from the after-the-revolution state or the type of the two descendants, whose grandparents had obtained the block from the state in 1940.

As expected, the Court decided in favor of the two descendants, even though the seller was the same: the state.

Besides the aberration of the sentences (the judges decided that the papers in 1940 are more valid than the ones issued after the Revolution) the case that the two guests brought up make us think that life isn’t that nice at all.

Throwing people in the street because they trusted the seller, the after-the-Revolution state, is a phenomenon that one meets in the entire country. It does not coincide with the banishment of the people in the nationalized houses, which is caused by the Mafia of retrocession that involves politicians, journalists, lawyers, judges and all kinds of sly dogs. This is about rightful owners who are being dispossessed of their houses with a simple Court order despite the terms of the Romanian Constitution. Therefore, we deal with injustice on several levels:

1) Constitutional. Property is not a right for a certain category of people.

2) Legal. The seller of the house is the state. The Court order decides that the state sold something it never owned. The state cheated on certain citizens of it.

3) Social. In many cases similar to the one in Bucharest, the ones that obtain in Court a greater validity of their property documents than the ones of the tenants usually have a place to live in. They want the apartments just to be able to sell them. The buyer is banished in order for other people to get rich on their behalf. There are many similar cases in Romania these days. Actress Julieta Szonyi and baritone Dan Iordachescu have appealed to all kinds of institutions. They also created a blog to gather other petitions as well: Legea 112.blogspot.com. Like in the case of other great injustices in the after-the-Revolution period, no one defends these people.

Explicable. They don’t have the money that the retrocession Mafia uses to bribe the judges, journalists, politicians and local authorities. Therefore, one can clearly see that there is no force to help them fight against this injustice. The social democrats should be the ones to take care of this fact. However, in exchange for taking part in the strange deals of the Tariceanu Government, SDP supports the opponent. We still have to wait for a party that would fight for the victims of the predatory after-the-Revolution capitalism.