Vîntu and Luca were arrested for playing "pass the potato" with money, although the amounts involved were definitely something - the 328 million Euros which Petromservice got following the contract to sell the oil operations and the transfer of the 10,000 employees to Petrom, concluded in 2007 and completed in 2008.

Here"s what we can infer from what the prosecutors are saying:

It all started like this: "We have some money, what do we do now?"

In other words: in reality the money is ours, but it appears on the books of Petromservice, which has other shareholders as well (in fact, we can"t rule out the fact that the other shareholders are mere strawmen) - how do we go about making sure that the money enters our pockets?

What followed was a very popular, and not at all sophisticated game, because Vîntu had already played it with the FNI: we buy some cheap shares for a pittance and then sell them a hundred times dearer to Petromservice, like we did with the shares of Exportimport, between 1997-2000, when we bought them for 2 bani and sold them for about 200 lei to the FNI (well, figuratively speaking, but it"s easy to catch the drift).

Vîntu and his buddies were on both sides of the transactions: they sold and bought the shares to each other - such a nice maneuver - and in the end the huge difference ended up in their pockets.

Honest money.

Once again, we don"t actually rule out the possibility that it was indeed their money - of Vîntu and friends - and that they had not in fact prejudiced the other shareholders, because another experience of Vîntu, that of Romextera Bank, showed that he was capable of signing thousands of notarized powers of attorney, allowing the employees to officially appear as shareholders of the bank, but the shares would in fact be his.

Just like the money which was used to capitalize the Romanian