Last April, in the Mediterranean, four plainclothes policemen went to the luxurious ‘Westin Draganara’ resort to arrest one of its guests: Prince Paul of Romania, who had come to the five-star hotel – with rooms costing up to 5 thousand euros. For one night – when he was detained.
At issue was a European arrest warrant and despite protestations of innocence, authorities refused to budge. “They didn’t listen to me, they took me in a car to be arrested”, he said, speaking to the ‘POLITICO’ newspaper from Malta, where he has been forced to stay for months due to a legal battle between European countries. Union countries.
The arrest of the Romanian aristocrat began the latest chapter in an unusual legal saga spanning decades and several European countries. At its center is Paul, the 76-year-old grandson of one of Romania’s last kings, who is being hunted across the Old Continent in a scheme to illegally reclaim royal lands belonging to his family. Others implicated include an Israeli diamond magnate, a former chief of staff to the Romanian prime minister who was once jailed for corruption, and a series of bribed officials.
Romania’s sprawling Snagov Forest is famous for containing a medieval monastery believed to be the final resting place of Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century warrior and Romanian national hero who was the inspiration for Dracula. Part of the forest belonged to King Carol II of Romania, who reigned between 1930 and 1940. It, like all state lands, was confiscated by the fascist government during World War II and then by the communists who abolished the monarchy in 1947.
For more than 40 years, Romania’s extinct royal family has been in exile, spread across Europe – including Paul, born in Paris in 1948, the son of Mircea Hohenzollern, the eldest son of King Carol II. Paul grew up in France and attended elite boarding schools in the United Kingdom – he was in the same year as King Charles III at Gardenstown, and didn’t move to Romania until he was 40. .
Returning to their homeland was only possible in 1989, when Romanians freed themselves from half a century of communist rule, in a revolution that saw the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day. With the fall of communism, Paul immediately returned to the country his ancestors ruled.
However, the exiled prince, a fine art dealer who spoke no Romanian, was not popular with everyone. Although the monarchy was never restored, the government gave the popular main branch of the royal family — first headed by Paul’s uncle, King Michael I, and today headed by the king’s daughter Margareta — a ceremonial role, allowing them to use the palace Elizabeth. Bucharest as his official residence. In 2012, a Roman court confirmed Paul’s royal lineage, but his royal right was never fully accepted in his ancestral country, including his family.
But that didn’t stop him from trying to carve out a role in Romanian public life: he ran for president of Romania in 2000, but received only 50,000 votes, or about 0.5%. With his American wife Leah, he has turned his five-story mansion in Bucharest into a kind of dark royal court, where he entertains dignitaries, diplomats and minor celebrities.
However, when a wealthy businessman with connections to the former prime minister of Romania approached Paul with an offer to help restore former royal lands, it was a golden opportunity to cement his title once and for all.
In 2006, Remus Drucka, former chief of staff to ex-prime minister Adrien Nastez, invited Paul and his wife to his lakeside property near the Snagov forest and offered them a deal: his company ‘Reciplia SRL’ could help restore Paul’s disputed ancestral lands. If Paul returns 50 to 80% of the assets to ‘Reciplia SRL’, he will be paid an advance of 4 million euros in the prince’s name. According to Romanian authorities, the total value of the land is 145 million euros.
Paul realized, however, that Drucka was in a group that included an up-and-coming Israeli president, Benjamin Steinmetz, and his right-hand man, Tal Silberstein, who were political advisers to Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern. In fact, it was the Steinmetz, a mining tycoon, originally with a fortune derived from African diamonds, who was the real financier of the project to restore the former royal lands, but not Drukka, leading Paul to believe – Resiplia owned almost 90%. Steinmetz along with Truica, a minority shareholder, according to court documents.
Paul did not receive the promised share in the sale of his property and filed a police report in 2015. “I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said. “I felt like I didn’t get my property back.” At the time, the Romanian authorities already had the prince’s ties to Truca, Steinmetz and a group of conspirators, including the trio’s lawyers and a series of corrupt local officials, involved in the illegal recovery of former royal lands under surveillance.
In December 2020, the police knocked on Paul’s door. Romania’s Supreme Court overturned earlier acquittals and sentenced the prince and his co-conspirators to three to seven years in prison because they were not charged with corruption. Paul is not home, he has gone to Portugal and does not know when he will return, said his wife Leah. Shortly after, Prince’s photo appeared on the Interpol website, and he became an official wanted man.
According to the Roman authorities, Paul’s role in the project was less, but no less central. “Although he was not a member of an organized crime group, he did a poor job of bribing officials”, “he was part of a group of interests revolving around him, which aimed at the illegal seizure of assets belonging to the Romanian state,” the court concluded. “Out of a desire to enrich himself. Incited, and knowing that he could not lawfully obtain the goods claimed, by invoking his association with the ex-King Carol II, the defendant [Paul da Roménia] It has agreed to be part of the project, which will cost the state 145 million euros.
In the end, the list of those punished was long enough to be uncanny: it included Romania’s Shadow Prince Paul; Former Prime Minister Truka’s corrupt chief of staff; Israeli diamond billionaire Steinmetz; A series of bribed local officials in exchange for transferring dozens of acres of state-owned land to Paul. In total, 19 people were convicted and jailed.
Paul was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison, Drucka to seven years, Steinmetz to five years – and he was later arrested in Greece and then in Cyprus, where he successfully defended himself against the demands. To deport Romanians on the grounds that conditions in Romania’s prisons were inhumane.
Police finally stopped him on a Paris street in June 2022 – not in Portugal, but in his native France. Romanian authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant.
A French court ruled in Paul’s favor and refused to extradite him to Romania, concluding that the prince could not have received a fair trial. The prince’s legal team also successfully challenged the Interpol wanted notice, which was dismissed. For now, at least, he was a free man.
After police detained him at the resort, he was quickly taken to a court hearing, where he was denied bail after the magistrate confirmed that the crimes he had been convicted of in Romania were too serious. He spent the next two months in prison. By the time he was out on bail in July, Paul’s black hair had turned white. A month later, on August 12, he got the result he expected: the Maltese Court of Appeal refused to extradite Romana on human rights grounds.
With a conviction in Romania and a European arrest warrant still hanging over his head, Paul could still be arrested in 25 EU member states. Following Malta’s verdict, Romania’s justice minister furiously vowed to continue to persecute the prince.
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