THINGS THAT MAKE NO SENSE, LIKE OLD LADIES AND MACHINEGUNS TOGETHER The secret information of Ioana Petrescu

• UPDATE

According to paginadepolitică.ro, which quotes HotNews.ro, the spokesperson of ORNISS said: "Concerning your enquiry, we inform you that Mrs. Ioana Petrescu, the current minister of Finance, and the family of Ph. D. Marius Petrescu, the managing director of the Office of the National Registry of Secret State Information, are not related in any way".

In a response sent via SMS to the inquiry of HotNews.ro, Ioana Petrescu, the minister of Finance has denied the allegations that Marius Petrescu is her father: "It is not true".

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Everyone noticed that finance minister Ioana Petrescu told president Traian Băsescu that the numbers in the study about the effects of cutting the social security contributions that he was insistently asking for from her, was "secret information", a line which beggared belief. Or, like Corneliu Vadim Tudor would say - "This woman is insane!"

On the next day, July 15th, Eurodeputy Norica Nicolai was elected as vice-president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE: the third largest political group, in size, in the European Parliament), as a kind of reward for political loyalty, being the only one of the Romanian liberals in the European Parliament who did not follow the order of Crin Antonescu to switch allegiances and join the European People's Party.

Days go by, seemingly unrelated things happen, such as for instance the event in Cotroceni and the one in Brussels.

You'd have to be one crazy person to look for a connection between those two things.

I am one such person.

I remembered that in March, Norica Nicolai had a harsh intervention in which she criticized Ioana Petrescu, three weeks after her appointment as minister of finance:

"I am publicly asking the Minister of Finance to tell Romanians whether the Treasury has the money needed to pay their pensions and wages this year, and if it does, to give us the exact amount it has available for that purpose.

My request comes amid the extremely high concern of the public following the statement made yesterday by minister Ioana Petrescu, in which she admitted that the money collected from the tax excise could go towards paying the pensions and salaries."

Then I remembered that in 2007, Norica Nicolai was the president of the commission set up by the Romanian parliament to investigate the European scandal of the CIA prisons in Romania, amid allegations that Americans had tortured Arabs suspected of terrorism.

Then I remembered that there was a rumor that the prison in Bucharest was located in the underground of the ORNISS (The Office of the National Registry of Secret State Information).

Then I remembered that the head of the ORNISS was called Marius Petrescu.

Petrescu?!

Well now!

Then I made three phone calls to three people who, being professionals, were obviously not to be trusted, and who, as if they had all agreed on it beforehand, coincidentally confirmed that Marius Petrescu was the father of Ioana Petrescu, the same Marius Petrescu who received a state aid of (I can only remember the approximate amount) of 85,365 Euros, through the Government Decision no. 1400 of 04/12/2003 (I am quoting from memory) of the Adrian Năstase government, to get surgery that cost 20 thousand (pick your currency!), in a hospital in Belgium, back when Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE who nominated Norica Nicolai as vice-president of the ALDE was the prime-minister of Belgium (I told you I was crazy and I couldn't control myself!).

Well, if the father is in charge of state intelligence, then it's natural that the daughter would not hand information over to the president.

Then I remembered that the press was saying that Marius Petrescu was an officer of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service (SIE).

Then I remembered that between 1997 and 2002, Marius Petrescu was the head of the Authority for Regulating the Imports and Exports of Strategic Materials and Weapons (ANCESIAC), which would explain such unrelated things, because as far as I remember, Marius Petrescu wasn't just anybody, but instead he was a Ph. D, because he is an associated professor at the "Valahia" University, of Târgovişte, where he was the thesis advisor for Norica Nicolai, the one who checked the basements of the ORNISS and wouldn't you know it, found no trace of tortured Arabs in there.

Meanwhile, I took my pills and noticed a few discrepancies: in a newspaper which states that Marius Petrescu hired his daughter at ORNISS, the daughter is mentioned as Anca Petrescu and since that is not the same as "Ioana"; and since Ioana Petrescu states that both her parents are engineers, something doesn't seem right: how could an engineer be an advisor for a thesis on security issues?

But the effect of the pills didn't take long to wear off.

So I remembered to make yet another phone call to yet another person, who told me that Anca Petrescu is the sister of Ioana Petrescu, daughter of the same Marius Petrescu, of the ORNISS suspected of abetting the torture of Arabs, surgery in Belgium and nepotism, all of the above things being well-guarded secrets, just as the CV of Ioana Petrescu, the current minister of Finance until the age of 20 is a secret, as is the fact that she went to Harvard through a 50,000 scholarship, which was allegedly paid using public funds, just as the money that will be lost from the reduction of the Social Security Contributions is public, but the sources are a state secret kept so by dad.

I admit that I don't have three sources for the entire phrase above, for some of those claims I only have one.

If all of this is true, al that's got left for us to clarify is what made Norica Nicolai decide to attack daddy's girl out of the blue.

And all this isn't true, then it serves Ioana Petrescu right for keeping her biography a secret.

Honey, but you can just treat it as a pamphlet!

You say you are not easily rustled anyway.