Romania’s richest man,Ioan Niculae jailed for illegal financing presidential campaign

Ioan Niculae

Romanian Billionaire, Ioan Niculae, and head of an agro-industrial conglomerate, was sentenced Thursday to two and a half years in prison for his involvement in illegal financing of the 2009 presidential campaign.
The Bucharest appeal court also condemned a former official of the ruling Social Democrats as well as two businessmen, the Mediafax agency reported.
Social democrat leader Gheorghe Bunea Stancu, the former president of the Braila County Council, got a three-year sentence for arranging the financing, according to Mediafax.
The court’s decisions are final and both Niculae and Bunea Stancu will be incarcerated. The court also decided to seize some EUR 144,000 from Niculae. The financial penalty won’t be a problem for the billionaire, who last year paid USD 90,000 to hunt an elephant and have it stuffed and shipped from South Africa to his mansion in Romania.
Ioan Niculae is Romania’s richest, according to the 2014 edition of the Forbes 500 Richest Romanians list. Forbes estimated Niculae’s fortune at some EUR 1.1 billion.
Gheorghe Bunea Stancu, former head of a Social Democrat affiliate in Braila, eastern Romania, was found to have used his influence to obtain a million euros ($1.09 million) from Niculae for illegal financing of an electoral campaign.
Niculae, owner of agrotech company Interagro asked in return for people to be appointed in the economy ministry who would support his business goals, in the event of an election win by Social Democrat candidate Mircea Geoana.
Geoana lost that presidential campaign to conservative Traian Basescu.
60-year-old Niculae, a keen hunter, is also at the centre of a scandal over low price public gas deliveries to private companies.

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