The RAFO Vice-Chancellor

The Onesti refinery saga, which passed from Iacobov to Marian Iancu, suffered an important change at the beginning of this month. An important Austrian vice-Chancellor lobbied the Romanian authorities to introduce RAFO in the CALDER-A portfolio, the company behind which the controversial Russian oligarchs are hiding.

Jurnalul National will show the unknown part of this deal and the reasons for which Hubert Gorbach, the vice-Chancellor in Vienna, got involved in the deal.

THE STAKE. The Onesti refinery still owes thousand of billions lei to the Romanian state, and the people that owned it in the past, Marian Iancu, the present owner of Poli Timisoara F.C., and Corneliu Iacobov, have been sent to trial for having initiated an organized crime group. In the same time, the Dutch company Calder-A International, represented by Todor Batkov, a Bulgarian lawyer and owner of Levski Sofia F.C., has been trying to purchase the refinery for the last few months. Jurnalul National has shown more than once that Batkov is the man of Mikhail Chernoy, a Russian oligarch who was banished from Bulgaria, because he was seen as a threat to the national security of the country on the south of the Danube.

At the beginning of October, Batkov appeared in public in Bucharest together with Austrian vice-Chancellor Hubert Gobach. The latter one is a member of BZO (the Alliance for Austria’s Future), a political formation initiated by Austrian politician Jorg Haider.

Gorbach and Batkov met with the president of AVAS (the National Authority for the Recovery of the State’s Assets), Razvan Orasanu, and tried to convince him to allow the takeover of RAFO by the consortium that also owns CALDER-A.

THE STASI COUNT. The visit of the vice-Chancellor to AVAS has another controversial person behind: Martin Shlaf. Austrian Shlaf is an associate of Todor Batkov in the Bulgarian mobile telephony company MobilTel. Mikhail Chernoy, the same Russian magnate who was banished from Bulgaria, used to own MobilTel. Moreover, Chernoy was also denied from the USA, as he is considered one of the leaders of the organized crime in Kremlin.

THE TACTICS. Martin Shlaf is well known for the doubtful deal in which he gets involved. He used the Austrian vice-Chancellor Gorbach in the past as well. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal in August 2006, Shlaf used Gorbach to mediate the purchase of a mobile telephony company in Serbia, Mobi 63. Boljub Karic, a person close to the former Yugoslavian President, Milosevic, and a fugitive wanted by the Interpol, bought the company. Karic is wanted by the Serbian authorities for tax evasion. During the negotiations with the Serbian Government, Shlaf and Gorbach used the fact that this country was starting the procedures for the adherence to the E.U. WSJ says the same tactics have been used in the case of the Bulgarian transaction as well. WSJ adds that there were several Austrian Parliament members who protested against using Gorbach as a puppet by Shlaf. Peter Pilz, Austrian green member of the Parliament, has asked recently for an investigation to say whether Shlaf received undue support from the Austrian Government in the Mobi 63 deal. Shlaf won himself a fortune in the ‘80s, when he illegally delivered computers produced in the Western Europe to STASI. According to WSJ, Shlaf had a STASI code name, "The Count".