Justice and Football
A new corruption scandal is rocking the Romanian sports world. The former chairman of the Professional Football League, Dumitru Dragomir has been charged together with other business people with tax evasion, embezzlement and money laundering in a case concerning the assignment of TV broadcasting rights for football matches.
Mihai Pelin, 08.04.2014, 17:14
According to prosecutors, the Professional Football League was prejudiced by three million euros, between 2011 and 2013, after those involved had used fictitious accounts to hide transactions on the sale of the first league matches to various TV stations. Normally the sale rights should have been distributed through direct negotiations between the League and winning companies.
The former chairman says he has evidence proving his innocence:
Dumitru Dragomir: “I have documents. Mind you, I have papers to prove my innocence. Investigators took away bags of sale-and-purchase documents of the houses I sold and of the blocks of flats I have purchased. It is normal. An investigation has been carried out and every prosecutor’s office is doing its job…Let’s wait and see whether Mitica Dragomir is guilty or not.”
Legal sources say that if found guilty on all three counts, the former soccer chief, dubbed don Corleone’ after the famous mafia leader from Francis Ford Copolla’s film, can get a 16 year prison sentence.
A controversial figure, widely covered by the media, Dragomir got into football business back in 1977 as chair of a football club. Between 1987 and 1989 he ran Victoria Bucharest, the football club of the Romanian political police, the Securitate, a job that got him a second jail sentence in 1990 for abuse in office, after a similar sentence for illegal gambling in 1976. A versatile man, very adapted to the system, don Corleone became part of the League’s board on the very first days of existence. He was the league’s vicepresident between 1992 and 1996. He got elected as the league’s president back in 1996 and after 17 years, he lost the election for president of the League in 2013 to former international Gino Iorgulescu.
Dragomir’s fortune has been estimated by journalists at over 25 million euros, mainly coming from real estate business. Prior to Dragomir’s case, the Romanian football went into a tailspin of turbulences and painful brushes with the law. A week ago, famous impresarios, former club leaders and financiers were given heavy prison sentences in a file on the transfers of Romanian footballers abroad, ten years ago. They were charged with fraud, money laundering and tax evasion, which cost the Romanian state 1.5 million dollars, while four football clubs incurred over 10 million dollars worth of prejudices.
