BUCHAREST — Mircea Geoană’s ex-campaign manager in Romania has business ties to a Russian who is close to the military and has campaigned for the Russian side in the Ukraine war. The campaign manager’s son also did a deal with a former executive from a company founded by a sanctioned oligarch, while the dad was advising an NGO that promoted the candidate, reporters exclusively revealed. Geoană was until September the deputy leader of NATO.
This is the first multi-country, multi-newsroom partnership involving Reporter since this website’s founding. The other participants are The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Context.ro (Romania), Delfi Estonia, Rise Moldova, Dossier Center (Russia). Truth Hounds (Ukraine) provided Reporter with exclusive research.
The exclusive investigation dominated Romanian media for a week, from morning talk shows on the radio to evening debates on TV as well as newspaper and news website front pages, generating a multitude of opinions and comments.
The reaction from Geoană was apoplectic, unhinged, and condemned by senior journalists and NGOs in the country. He claimed, falsely, that Reporter’s co-author, top investigative journalist Attila Biro, the head of Context.ro, had participated in the attempted assassination of a Bulgarian chief prosecutor. This outrageous claim was based, apparently, on a fake news campaign unleashed against Biro by criminal interests in Bulgaria after he exposed massive tax evasion schemes in the media. Geoană and his team made no apology despite being told of the obvious falsity multiple times.
Geoană also claimed that Russian disident and ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky financed the investigation and represented the Kremlin’s interests in attacking him, as the ex-deputy of NATO. Dossier Centre is indeed financed by Khodorkovsky but the rest of the conspiracy theory aired by the Romanian candidate has come as a surprise to reporters at Dossier, who didn’t even know who Geoană or his campaign underling were, when Reporter first contacted them to ask for help obtaining information from Russia.
Reporter had the pleasure to work with the journalists in exile at Dossier Centre on another occasion this year, covering the same Russian oligarch whose company employed the executive that did the deal in Romania with the son of the candidate’s campaign coordinator, as reported in the new joint investigation.
Geoană also said he has demanded that Romanian and NATO security services investigate the participating journalists, which raises the question of what he will do if he becomes president and, inevitably, media criticises him.