The Paradox of Giving Back Properties Unlawfully Gained

A short time ago, as I was conducting research at the Library of the Academy, a middle-aged man carrying under his arm a heavy file approached me:
- What do you know about the Skoda Affair, he asked?

A short time ago, as I was conducting research at the Library of the Academy, a middle-aged man carrying under his arm a heavy file approached me:

- What do you know about the Skoda Affair, he asked?

I told him what I knew: that in 1933, during the government headed by PM Alexandru Vaida Voievod, a huge corruption scandal rocked the Army.

Hefty bribes paid to generals at the helm of the Ministry of Defense insured that Romania would buy overpriced armament from the Czechs.

Media campaigns targeted the Skoda Affair and parliamentarians addressed it when taking the floor, with the most notable speech delivered by Dr. Nicolae Lupu.

Prosecutors’ inquiries followed, and even a trial, but the whole affair was dropped in the good Romanian way which fights corruption, but not really.

I was quite intrigued by the interest in long-forgotten corruption scandals the man stopping me had.

- Are you a historian, l asked? No, he was not. He was an engineer who studied the Skoda Affair for a personal reason: he owned an apartment in a building built with that bribe’s money by one of the people involved in the affair. The state subsequently confiscated the block of flats, but now the relatives living abroad of the man indicted in the Skoda Affair were claiming back the property.

Thus, the engineer risked to lose his apartment.

- Well, I said, but that was not a building erected with money earned from honest work! How could his relatives claim it back? The next thing we would hear would be that the relatives of Nicolae Malaxa would ask for his lost property, I said.

That casual remark proved to be a sort of a premonition: Malaxa’s heirs just received the official recognition from the Romanian state that they are due back 320 million euros for their nationalized property during the communist regime. It is the largest amount of money sp far the state says that it is due to former owners or their heirs.

But one thing which was lost in the process of property restoration was that Malaxa epitomized the Romanian corrupt businessman before WWII.

In a note sent to London, on 3 November 1947, the British ambassador to Bucharest Adrian Holman wrote that: "the most powerful and perfected technique to corrupt the government was to use the government funds to that end. Any subsidy the Government gives to companies is in fact double the economic needs, to use half for bribing the officials who made the funding possible."

Using information from the British intelligence services Holman’s report showed that "Malaxa bribed the communist government too, giving then PM Petru Groza as a birthday present the same house it previously gave to Deputy PM Mihai Antonescu, during the rule of dictator Ion Antonescu."

Holman concluded that "the habit of corrupting the politicians for personal gain is met with hostility and despise from those Romanian who fight to turn their country democratic."

I thought I would have a laugh when mentioning Malaxa in my conversation with the man worried about the Skoda Affair. I know now I did not have the final laugh, though.

Translated by Anca Paduraru