The alliance of the families of the port of Constanţa

It isn"t that clear what was the goal of yesterday"s raid by the dozens of policemen, gendarmes, Fraud Squad inspectors and customs officers: was it to uncover the fuel smuggling, the smuggling of agricultural products or any other kind of smuggling?

There is one essential distinction, between fuel and food products, even though contraband remains a crime, regardless of what is being smuggled.

Aside from the temptation of getting rich that is driving smugglers, the smuggling of food products meets a national need due to the pauperization of the population, whereas fuel contraband is guided by nothing else except greed.

• Joint action in the Constanţa Port area

The Ministry of Administration and Internal Affairs, through the specialized structures of the Romanian Police and of the Romanian Gendarmerie, in cooperation with the Fraud Squad and the National Customs Authority and with the help of the Romanian Metrology Office, starting today, March 17th, a major control in the area of the port of Constanţa.

The objective of the joint action consists of the verification of the authorization and operating documents of the customs warehouses, the legality of the use of the storage, transfer and measurement systems. The raid will also check the origin of the energy products held and their release from the warehouses.

The action which began today is part of the cooperation between several institutions to prevent and fight the tax evasion and the undermining of the Romanian economy through the smuggling and illegal distribution of goods into the country through the ports of the Black Sea. Another goal was to fight tax evasion on commercial operations performed through these areas and the creation of organized criminal factions.

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

(The Public Relations and Information Department - The Ministry of Administration and Internal Affairs)

The press release of the Ministry of Internal Affairs does not go into details.

As a result, we won"t go into details either.

Under normal circumstances, the raid should target the two buddies - one of the former heads of the Customs Offices of Constanţa and a head of the Port Administration. Since around 2009, the two make about 30,000 Euros together each God-given day.

One million Euros a month.

Twelve million Euros a year.

The honorable folks have a customs brokerage firm, registered on the name of the father-in-law of one of them, which, by forging documents, magically turns food imports into domestically produced goods.

That"s very nice.

It is a patriotic gesture!

On top of that, the volume and value of the imported goods that they actually record on the books are heavily understated (it must be because it breaks their heart to acknowledge that Romania is a net importer of agricultural products) .

This is another patriotic gesture: the National Statistics Institute will thus report that output has increased and imports have decreased.

We are not joking: the volumes are so big that they could influence the statistics reports!

The importers are Arabs.

There are whispered rumors that the largest rice importers in Romania are among them.

The former head of customs conceals his enormous gains by investing in real estate on the Romanian seaside, through a company owned by his father.

So he gets money from the father-in-law of his buddy and then gives it to his own father.

Here"s to their families becoming even more tightly knit in the future.