Not even now, during my recent polemic, did I receive the answer to my proposals.
I never received the answer from any of the Romanian experts.
The only ones that ever truly gave me an answer were three foreigners and all of them did so unofficially, in private conversations.
Paradoxically enough, in 1998, the first one was one of the senior experts of the USAID, with whom I was waging a full-on journalistic battle - his name was De Maynard, I don't know if he is still alive, he was close to retirement back then and I was bound by a confidentiality agreement not to speak about him for a while, because I would have endangered his job and his pension.
He had come in for an audit, to assess the flaws of the Rasdaq project, which BURSA had shockingly pointed out.
He asked for a private conversation with me, at the headquarters of the newspaper.
An argument began, which for me was exhausting; he had extensive financial and banking knowledge, which had overwhelmed me, I was struggling to uncover the mistakes in his arguments, which concerned areas I barely had a notion about (he had been a representative of the World Bank in an Asian country).
After about two hours of battle, he started smiling, then he outright laughed: "OK! OK! I just wanted to test you! To see who we're dealing with and how resilient you are. Now I know who you are and what you want - the first principle in a confrontation is to know your enemy", he told me.
And he went on to say, shockingly:
"Of course you are right! Of course our system places you at a disadvantage and yours is the rational one!"
And then he said:
"I feel I have to tell you that you will lose this battle for your country and as a matter of fact, I feel pleasure in telling you that. In 1990, you lost a war and of course, you need to pay war compensations. Regardless of