The prosecutors ask for the temporary arrest of Dinu Patriciu and his business partners, Colin R. Hart and Philip Stephenson. They are accused of the illegal takeover of an 85 million euro book debt from Libya. The motivation of the request to the judges has approximately 50 pages.
Yesterday, Patriciu walked out a free man from his 19th hearing in the Rompetrol file. He made an astonishing statement according to which he is to be arrested. True. The Prosecutorsâ Office confirmed last night, unofficially, that the prosecutors of DIICOT (the Direction for the Investigation of the Terrorism and Organized Crime Acts) would ask the Court for the temporary arrest of the Rompetrol president and of his business partners, American Colin R. Hart, the representative of Cypriot off-shore Saltville LTD, and Philip Stephenson, vice-president of the Rompetrol Group (TRG), for several crimes. The new accusations regard a book debt in Lybia that they seem to have taken before in the name of Rompetrol. Judicial sources say the book debt that the prosecutors use in order to ask for the arrest of the three businessmen is written on approximately 50 pages.
BOOK DEBT
According to the investigators, the Rompetrol representatives have illegally cashed an external book debt of the Romanian state, which is worth 85 million USD, using an extremely ingenuous combination. The money that Romania had to cash after an investment in Libya, when Ceausescu was still the Romanian leader, were moved from one company to another, which was to keep the attention away from their initial provenience. At that time, the contract was dealt by Rompetrol of Libya, a subsidiary of the Romanian Rompetrol, which, after the privatization, acted like the money invested in the respective firm before 1989 belonged to them, but not to the Romanian state. According to the investigators, the money
