A short time ago, as I was conducting research at the Library of the Academy, a middle-aged man carrying under his arm a heavy file approached me:
- What do you know about the Skoda Affair, he asked? A short time ago, as I was conducting research at the Library of the Academy, a middle-aged man carrying under his arm a heavy file approached me:
- What do you know about the Skoda Affair, he asked?
I told him what I knew: that in 1933, during the government headed by PM Alexandru Vaida Voievod, a huge corruption scandal rocked the Army.
Hefty bribes paid to generals at the helm of the Ministry of Defense insured that Romania would buy overpriced armament from the Czechs.
Media campaigns targeted the Skoda Affair and parliamentarians addressed it when taking the floor, with the most notable speech delivered by Dr. Nicolae Lupu.
Prosecutorsâ inquiries followed, and even a trial, but the whole affair was dropped in the good Romanian way which fights corruption, but not really.
I was quite intrigued by the interest in long-forgotten corruption scandals the man stopping me had.
- Are you a historian, l asked? No, he was not. He was an engineer who studied the Skoda Affair for a personal reason: he owned an apartment in a building built with that bribeâs money by one of the people involved in the affair. The state subsequently confiscated the block of flats, but now the relatives living abroad of the man indicted in the Skoda Affair were claiming back the property.
Thus, the engineer risked to lose his apartment.
- Well, I said, but that was not a building erected with money earned from honest work! How could his relatives claim it back? The next thing we would hear would be that the relatives of Nicolae Malaxa would ask for his lost property, I said.
That casual remark proved to be a sort of a pr
