Murky deaths. A bid to kidnap a mother on the school run in London. And, oh yes, Tony Blair. How a corrupt EU nation is exploiting Brussels’ law to carry out its dirty work in Britain
jails. But because Britain is still an EU country, the rules mean I must be extradited.
‘ It’s been a very stressful 18 months for me and my family.’
He is referring, partly, to what happened to his partner, Adriana.
One morning in 2016, she dropped their children at a nursery in St John’s Wood and was confronted by two men wearing balaclavas, who attempted to pull her in the direction of their car. ‘She threw herself onto the ground,’ says Alexander. ‘ As they were struggling, another mother came out of the nursery and started shouting.
‘A taxi then stopped and the driver asked what was going on, so the men fled.’
Police recorded the incident as an attempted robbery. But as the men showed no interest in her £4,000 earrings, her car keys or handbag, Adamescu is convinced it was an organised kidnapping.
More recently, Adriana filmed a number of men she believed were following her as she shopped. ‘One was holding a walkie-talkie,’ says Adamescu. ‘As she approached, he was told “watch out, she’s behind you” by someone speaking in Romanian. Then the man dived for cover.’
Video of the incident, and a witness statement, have been filed in court as part of his defence.
Also filed by Adamescu’s legal team is the expert witness statement by Sir John Scarlett and Lord Carlile. Based on testimony from ten sources, including many senior figures in Romanian politics, it runs to more than 30 pages, and argues that the ‘key objective’ of Romania’s attempt to extradite Alexander Adamescu is to paralyse his family’s finances ‘in order to silence the daily newspaper’.
The prosecution of Alexander, it states, bears ‘all the hallmarks of a politically motivated campaign using the criminal law, started by the Victor Ponta government’.
Intriguingly, given Sir John’s onetime
HOWEVER,relationship with Tony Blair, the document details the former Labour PM’s links to Ponta.
In 2016, Ponta was accused of receiving €220,000 from businessman Sebastian Ghita ‘to pay for former British Prime Minister Blair to come to Romania’.
To many, this alleged payment in 2012 looked suspiciously like a bribe. For, as the document states: ‘ Mr Ghita was repaid for his financial generosity with an inclusion on the list of parliamentary candidates for election.’
Blair visited Romania in 2012, and was paid a substantial sum to give a speech. While there is no suggestion that he was involved in any impropriety, the circumstances of the payment led to Ponta being accused of political corruption (which he denies).
Back in the UK, Alexander Adamescu’s plight has caused serious political debate about the European Arrest Warrant system.
Its defenders point out that British authorities have used these warrants to bring suspected criminals back to the UK to face trial.
critics say the system is flawed because it works on the assumption that all 27 EU nations have equally robust legal systems — which is not the case, Romania being one example where corruption is prevalent.
‘There is a danger of a serious miscarriage of justice because the European Arrest Warrant system deems all Europe’s justice systems to be as good as each other,’ says Tory MP Sir Graham Brady, who has met Adamescu several times.
David Davies, MP for Monmouth, who has raised Adamescu’s case in Parliament, says: ‘ The EU’s warrant system is clearly being used, in this case, to hoick a resident of the UK off to Romania for entirely political reasons.’
Adamescu is now awaiting the outcome of his extradition case, which has been adjourned for several weeks.
‘It’s a nightmare — like a sword hanging above your head,’ he says. ‘The only thing that gives me faith is that I still have confidence in British justice.’
But like those characters in TV’s McMafia, whose circumstances are so similar, his fate for now remains in the balance.
THIS week’s episode of the BBC drama McMafia showed Russian gangsters discussing how they could bribe corrupt Moscow politicians to bring trumped-up fraud charges against a rival, London-based oligarch.
The man would then be extradited from Britain to Moscow — where he’d either languish in prison for years, or as they cynically say in the trade, ‘disappear’.
It’s a typically murky plot twist in this hit series, which portrays the capital as a prime square in a global chessboard on which corrupt foreign countries and ruthless criminal gangs are able to ply their lucrative trade with virtual impunity.
Yet while TV critics have heralded McMafia as a great work of fiction, a version of this story-line is being played out for real.
On Wednesday this week, eerily similar events to the ones in the TV drama were being outlined at Westminster magistrates’ court.
This high- stakes, true-life drama involves the former head of MI6, an allegation about a shady payment of 220,000 euros for Tony Blair to visit Romania, a mysterious suicide of a key witness and the suspicious prison death of a critic of the Romanian government
At the centre of the case is softly spoken Alexander Adamescu, 39, who has spent most of the past 18 months fighting efforts to extradite him to Romania.
The son of a businessmen who made a fortune in the Eastern European country following the collapse of communism, Adamescu is accused by the Romanian government of multiple counts of bribery and money-laundering. Authorities there want him to face trial in the capital, Bucharest.
He claims he won’t get a fair trial because the case against him has been fabricated as part of an elaborate plot to steal assets from his family’s business empire.
In his fight, he’s supported by several British MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has said that ‘serious questions arise over how he has been treated’.
In a further, chilling echo of McMafia, Adamescu says the mother of his three small children was subjected to what he describes as an attempted kidnapping in leafy St John’s Wood, London, by two men in balaclavas.
A year ago, Adamescu’s elderly father, Dan, died of sepsis after falling ill while incarcerated in a squalid Romanian prison.
Since then, Alexander Adamescu’s case has repeatedly been raised in Westminster, amid concerns that the European Arrest Warrant system (under which the Romanians are trying to extradite him) is being abused.
The system is meant to ensure that a warrant issued by a judge in one EU country is enforced in another. But critics say it has been used to pursue people for relatively minor offences and is misused by some countries.
There is another intriguing element to this case.
Like many recent scandals involving Britain’s relationship with countries famed for bribery and corruption, former Prime Minister Tony Blair makes a cameo appearance.
Documents compiled by Adamescu’s lawyers outline Blair’s apparently lucrative relationship with Romania’s ex-Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, the main political fixer accused of persecuting their client.
Blair’s name crops up in an expert report jointly compiled by the former head of British intelligence, Sir John Scarlett, and Lord Carlile, the barrister who was once the Government’s anti-terror adviser.
Notoriously, Sir John, as head of MI6, drew up the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s so- called ‘ weapons of mass destruction’, which, though subsequently proved to be false, gave Blair the justification he wanted to persuade MPs that Britain should invade Iraq.
These days, Sir John and Carlile have a private consultancy that offers clients strategic advice. They were hired by Adamescu.
To fully understand this troubling saga, we must return to the early Eighties, when Adamescu, aged two, was taken by his father to what was then West Germany as they fled Communist Romania.
AfTERbeing granted residency, Dan sold a valuable stamp collection and used the proceeds to start a property business, which prospered during the ensuing boom years. Then, following the fall of communism, he returned to Romania and started a conglomerate called the Nova Group.
Over time, it came to control a number of shopping centres and hotels, and the country’s largest insurance firm, Astra. He also bought Romania’s best- known newspaper, Romania Libera.
Alexander, grew up a German citizen and, in his 20s, went to work for the family firm before moving to London in 2012. Here, he hoping for a career as a playwright.
With partner Adriana Constantinescu, 33, he took up residence close to Lord’s cricket ground, a wealthy neighbourhood where homes fetch around £3 million. The couple have two sons aged five and three and a younger daughter.
However, back in Romania, things weren’t running so smoothly.
His family’s newspaper, Romania Libera, was publishing highly critical reports about Victor Ponta, a Left-wing politician known as ‘the Kim Jong-un of Romania’ (for the way he held vast outdoor rallies like the North Korean dictator).
In 2012, Ponta became Romania’s prime minister, and throughout his three-year tenure, Dan Adamescu’s newspaper was unrelenting in its critical coverage of him.
for example, it claimed the PM had falsified sections of his CV and plagiarised almost half of his university doctorate by cutting and pasting from the internet.
It also accused him of corruption — printing stories that alleged that when he was a lawyer, his firm overcharged major corporate clients.
In 2014, Ponta’s government returned fire. Regulators took control of the Adamescu family insurance firm, which was subsequently liquidated. Then Ponta went on television to accuse Dan Adamescu of leading a ‘network of corruption’, adding: ‘I am certain that we will shortly be hearing even more things about this from the state prosecutor’s office.’
And so it proved. Within a fortnight, masked anti-terror police raided Dan Adamescu’s home in Romania and arrested him. He was charged with paying a £17,000 bribe to judges handling the liquidation of the insurance firm.
Taken to court in what his supporters claim was a show trial, he was convicted and jailed for four years. During the case, one witness mysteriously committed suicide, leaving prosecutors to rely on the testimony of a single witness who frequently contradicted himself.
NOTsurprisingly, the verdict was widely condemned. Alexander Adamescu duly filed a lawsuit with the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, seeking £200 million compensation for what he claimed was the Romanian government’s deliberate efforts to destroy (and nationalise) the family business empire.
Then, days later, the action in this murky, international affair switched to Britain.
In June 2016, Alexander was due to give a lecture about corruption in Romania at a club in central London. However, as he approached the building, he was arrested by Met police officers.
A European Arrest Warrant for him had been issued after authorities in Romania charged him with bribing judges.
Under EU rules, British police were forced to help their Romanian colleagues, arrest Adamescu and prepare him for extradition.
Since then, Alexander (who was bailed after two nights in Wandsworth jail), has been fighting attempts to get him taken to Bucharest — quite understandably, considering his father’s grim fate.
for, after being convicted on bribery charges, his father was incarcerated at the notorious Radhova prison. Kept in what he described as inhuman, squalid conditions, he contracted sepsis and died in January last year aged 68.
During his son’s hearing at Westminster magistrates’ court this week, lawyers argued on his behalf that the request from the Romanian authorities should be denied because the entire prosecution is politically motivated.
Naturally, the Romanian government’s lawyers deny this.
But the case raises important questions about the European Arrest Warrant system and whether it is open to abuse from governments that want their citizens extradited for political motives rather as part of a criminal investigation.
‘It’s an uphill battle,’ Adamescu told me yesterday. ‘ We have come up with lots of proof about political motivation, corruption and the appalling conditions in Romania’s