AFTER ONE YEAR: DEPRIVED OF HONOR AND HIS WORD Nicu Marcu is an extremely brave man

Nicu Marcu's courage is strikingly visible in the chart called "NAV Dynamic of the SIFs", presented above, where anyone can see how SIF Banat Crişana goes off the reservation compared to the other SIFs and everybody knows that Nicu Marcu pretended not to notice.

Not everybody is that brave.

After one year in charge of the ASF, which elapsed yesterday, we can assess who is Ph. D. Nicu Marcu and what he wants.

Another one who was brave was Ştefan Boboc, who pretended not to notice that FNI had no depository bank.

Ph. D. Ştefan Boboc, president of the CNVM since 2000, was arrested, placed in handcuffs and placed on latrine duty.

Two more commissioners of the CNVM got the same mission, meaning that latrine duty should be seen as the pinnacle of achievement for the overseers of the capital market.

But Ph. D. Marcu is far braver than Ph. D. Boboc, because Boboc did not have any precedents (and there was never anyone like him anywhere else), but Marcu already knows about Boboc precedent, in the same country as him and yet he's not afraid!

He's looking at the chart and yet he's not afraid!

That bump in the SIF Banat Crişana chart is a crude manipulation, which is punishable by jail.

The authors of the manipulation are the people in charge of SIF Banat Crişana, who include a person who has (already) been convicted on charges of stock market manipulation, and who, during serving his time, took advantage of being allowed to leave jail and got hired as advisor to president Bogdan Drăgoi, whom he advises by teaching him the basics of the manipulations he founded.

The convict is called Najib el Lakis.

Nicu Marcu knows.

Nicu Marcu inherited the situation, but when it became his area of "jurisdiction", he didn't prohibit Lakis from operating on the stock market anymore.

He cleaned up the ASF, he fired 12 executives, but Lakis, the convict of SIF1, he let him get on with his business.

Some say that in fact, Lakis is the master, and Drăgoi is just his employee.

In other words, the reverse of the official situation.

Nicu Marcu pretends not to see that a capital market manipulator, who has already been convicted on that charge, is still taking part in stock market manipulation.

Nicu Marcu is very brave.

Nicu Marcu did not enforce he was appointed by the Parliament to enforce: nobody in the management of SIF Banat Crişana has received any kind of sanction for manipulation.

Not even an admonishment.

He hasn't even come out with some serious statement along the lines of: "No gentlemen, those numbers are misleading".

He did not have this cowardice.

There would have been a huge scandal, the manipulation he been going on for quite some time, about seven years; Lakis would have been arrested again, with Drăgoi in tow; Doina Dascălu, the former interim head of the ASF who tolerated the manipulation (at least, if she wasn't an outright accomplice) and Gabriel Grădinescu, the ASF employee in charge of the stock market; some executives who Marcu later fired via "restructuring" would have been fired, (there is money to be made there, so Marcu replaced them with some of his).

Instead of doing that, Nicu Marcu shepherded a special regulation issued specifically for the Lakis-Drăgoi cooperative, as allegedly the manipulation was not the result of the managers of SIF Banat Crişana, but of regulatory deficiencies.

Allegedly.

An apparently cunning maneuver.

In reality, the regulation wasn't necessary, the manipulatory situation had been created Lakis and the managers of SIF Banat Crişana could have solved it themselves, by delisting the company which, via a trade of a few hundred lei, would blatantly inflate their NAV by 1 billion lei.

Since he was new in the business, Nicu Marcu thought he was clever and gave the manipulators a way out - BURSA had pushed the "cooperative" into a dead-end, it had explained, beyond any deniability, that the management of SIF1 could be legally classified as market manipulation.

The manipulation charge is still valid today.

Nicu Marcu doesn't really get that, he thinks he's dealt with it.

But currently, aside from the valid charge of market manipulation, comes the accusation that the president of the ASF Nicu Marcu has covered it up, being an accomplice.

Nicu Marcu is extremely brave.