The Parliament passed a law admitting the former tenants' right to property on grounds of Law 112/ 1995. This is about the tec regime, houses the tenants bought from state institutions called Enterprises for Constructions, Repairs and Administration of Dwellings, although the houses were the object of ongoing property claim lawsuits. The new law also protects the well-meaning tenants whose property purchase contracts were annulled. They are to be paid updated damages, which they can use as for advance to buy some lodging places the state is making available as priority. 18 years after the fall of communism, the property return is still unsettled. Moreover, the rules meant to settle it are still being modified. Left politicians made the tenants promises and they assailed the rightful owners. Right politicians gave the owners some satisfaction, but they neglected the tenants. Governments, political parties, MPs and magnates are in the habit of changing these laws to pursue personal or electoral interests, which is actually the same. There are two big tricks we can decipher in the intricate labyrinth of legislative norms meant to delay a true, fair and fast solution to the property return: the well-meaningness of the tenants-buyers and the damages to be paid to the owners. In 1990 the state of Romania owned the properties abusively grabbed and rented by the communists, after the owners had been left homeless. The process of distributing and renting the confiscated houses went on unhampered during Ion Iliescu's rule. The absolute novelty, one that not even the communists did dare think of, was the sale of the confiscated houses to the tenants, as token of disdain for the true owners (shrewdly called former owners). And the prices were ridiculously small, of course. This is the point where a matter such as well-meaningness is emerging, which the Chamber of Deputies confirmed yesterday. Some of them didn't know the property was being claimed by trial, so they bought something illegally obtained. Their well-meaningness entitles them to continue to be owners. The real problem is the seller, not the buyer. It was the seller who proved evil intentions. It is about the above-mentioned enterprises that sold the properties, perfectly aware of what they would sell, taking political orders from Ion Iliescu. They would sell houses undergoing property return lawsuits. Both the presidents and the employees of such enterprises are guilty, still they are protected by law. The damages the ECHR decided Romania was to pay and the ones now to be cashed by the tenants whose purchase contracts were annulled out of such evil intentions of the enterprises, that is of the state, will come from citizens' pockets. The Liberals came up with an idea to avoid more sentences against Romania in international lawsuits. They established the Property Fund. Even if it isn't functional yet, in the end it will provide state shares, meaning public money as well. The compensation for the true owners is a cheat by which the political rulers, no matter who they are, manage two things: to look like justice is done for a category of communism victims and to satisfy the tenants, who matter in electoral terms, because they are more numerous. So by underpricing, the tenants get to own other people's houses and the rightful owners are left without their properties and forced into cashing a compensation. The latter will come intolerably slowly from the state, that is from all of us, and at the real price. The approach the Parliament has got to now, when the parliamentary elections are due soon, is a mock of a solution that could have been applied since the very 90s: compensation for the tenants, not for the owners. Otherwise, the owners would have got their houses back, state authorities would have built flats for the tenants, they all would have owned something and the budget effort would have been much smaller than the one taken to pay damages for all the villas to be returned to the rightful owners. Politicians have fooled everybody and they have carried out nothing, except for their own property interests. This has been the only target of the property return laws. The bosses paid nothing for the luxurious houses they have lived in since 1989. Therefore the fair price is to be paid by the state, that is by its citizens, both tenants and owners, who were led to a war against each other. These really well-meaning buyers, politicians are generous with the compensation coming from our pockets, when they can't just steal straight.

Rasvan MOLDOVEANU