Since the acquisition of Rompetrol in 1998, the name of Dinu Patriciu has been inextricably linked to the company developments. The businessman has saved the company, which had losses of $ 1.5 million.
In 2001, FPS and Rompetrol Group signed the privatization contract of the Petromidia oil refinery.
Patrciu's business strategy was to use Rompetrol as the core of a holding company that he founded in the Netherlands and which in 2009 came to include over 20 companies, with a turnover of 8.7 billion dollars.
After privatization, prosecution investigation for fraud, tax evasion and money laundering was initiated against Dinu Patriciu. It all culminated with his arrest, in May 2005.
But prosecutors of the Prosecutor General Office failed to present sufficient evidence to prove the judges the need to have Patriciu arrest after they put him through two half-marathon hearings.
The 40 hours of arrest cost the Rompetrol Group 40 million dollars.
A year later, in 2006, Patriciu was sent to trial for seven charges, counting also the capital market manipulation charge.
The court acquitted Dinu Patriciu seven years after he had been first detained. The Bucharest Court found him not guilty, although the prosecutor had asked for a 20 years in prison sentence, the maximum possible.
Dinu Patriciu filed a complaint with the ECHR about the conditions of his detention
In early 2012, the ECHR rejected as inadmissible the complaint of the businessman. The lack of ventilation and the presence of open-toilets do not reach such gravity to be qualified as inhuman and degrading treatment, the judicial reasoning reads.
In turn, Dinu Patriciu won a lawsuit against the Romanian Intelligence Service. The businessman asked, in 2007 got moral damages in the amount of EUR 1 million for being illegally intercepted in the Rompetrol case. Two years later, the Court of Appeal ruled that the SRI must pay compensation to Patriciu amounting to 50,000 lei.
At that time, the Court held that the recording of telephone conversations by SRI, the Romanian State violated Patriciu’s right to correspondence.