"My daughter bought her apartment in a fair manner, she has got a legally rented office, she is notary public, I do not see any problem with the apartment she bought with her own money after she sold the house in Corbeanca, where he had lived with Bodo after they broke up. What is the problem? " Traian Basescu said, in March 2009.
This is how the President defended his eldest daughter when Ioana Băsescu was accused that she had bought a luxury apartment way over her financial strength. Specifically, the president's daughter purchased a penthouse in the Northern area of the Capital at a price of 544 000 euros excluding VAT. She said she earned her money from her honest profession of notary public and the sale of a villa she shared with ex-husband, Bogdan Marin.
"I own a condo that I bought in March 2008, I paid it by bank transfer ... in full. I am a notary public, I was a lawyer, I earned money, because that's my job," Ioana Basescu said .
In fact, the real price of the apartment house at that time was over 1 million euro. The penthouse has 300 square meters with a terrace of 100 square meters, three rooms and a living room with electric floor heating. In the same apartment complex, Ioana Basescu had rented an office in which she operated her notary public office.
The problems arose, however, only after the media revealed who owned the apartment building. The building was built by businessman Puiu Popoviciu on the former University of Agriculture land. The land was taken illegally, according to anticorruption prosecutors who arrested in this case on Puiu Popoviciu, the former rector of the Agriculture University, Ion Alecu and the former head of the DGIPI, Cornel Ilie Serban. The case was quickly covered up and President Basescu rehabilitated the image of Popoviciu openly.
No one has ever actually explained how Ioana Basescu had the hundreds of thousands of euros for such an apartment. Moreover, the president's daughter has had a villa in Otopeni which the President of the country himself donated her after he became mayor of Bucharest. Specifically, in 2000, Traian Basescu purchased land in a selected area of the capital at a price suspiciously low, then he sold l it for an amount 10 times greater. His partner in this transaction was the businessman Costel Căşuneanu.
With the money obtained, Traian Basescu claimed he bought the villa in Otopeni for 280 000 dollars. Three weeks later, Traian Basescu donated the fresh bought villa to his daughter Ioana, and in February 2003 he allocated to himself the Mihaileanu villa. Only in 2004 the National Office for Prevention and Control of Money Laundering opened a file, but after the presidential elections, the case was dismissed. And this were not the only presidential family business deals . Last year the same Ioana Basescu bought 290 hectares of agricultural land at NANA, with a loan of 1 million taken from CEC Bank. The president immediately admitted that the land was for him.
The land was purchased from the company Berfige Ltd, a small company. That after the company managed in only a month and a half to purchase the compacted surface from 26 owners.