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Costel Comana, 53, was a Romanian millionaire about to be indicted for corrupt business deals in his native country when he hanged himself in the toilet of an Airbus just before the plane landed in Costa Rica.<\/p>\n The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its Romanian partner, the RISE Project, investigated his death and found that Comana\u2019s life was complicated.<\/p>\n He was tangled in a web of murky businesses with a powerful group of Romanian politicians and businessmen who spent their holidays at Cumbuco, an oceanside resort in the northeast of Brazil. The most prominent of the Cumbuco group is Liviu Dragnea, 54, the president of Romania\u2019s ruling Social Democratic Party and one of the country\u2019s most powerful politicians.<\/p>\n Comana and Dragnea go way back. It was Comana who put the first million in Dragnea\u2019s pocket. The lives of the politician and the millionaire were intertwined as they rose together to wealth and power.<\/p>\n Over the years, the friends and their business activities shuttled between Romania and Brazil, with money from the Eastern European nation apparently funding an increasingly lavish lifestyle in the beautiful coastal resort.<\/p>\n The last trip of Comana\u2019s life started in Cumbuco.<\/p>\n The small fishing village of 1,600 people on the South Atlantic coast is blessed with beautiful wide beaches and renowned sand dunes. The real draw, however, are the constant southeasterly trade winds and mild weather which makes it ideal for kitesurfing and windsurfing.<\/p>\n Since 2014, Comana had been trying to start a new life in Cumbuco, the seaside resort he had vacationed in for many years. He was trying to get away from the dark clouds that were gathering over him in his native country. In fact, one week before he killed himself, Comana learned that directors of Regiotrans, his railway company in Romania, had been arrested for bribing executives<\/a> at the state-owned national railway company, CFR, and officials at the Ministry of Transportation. Prosecutors also planned to indict Comana but he wasn\u2019t in the country so they just said the indictment included some unnamed persons.<\/p>\n According to prosecutors, Regiotrans was paying off CFR and government officials so Comana\u2019s company could take over railway routes from the state-owned company and illegally cash in more than $345 million in state subsidies.<\/p>\n The scheme was clever.<\/p>\n Regiotrans took over routes which had little passenger traffic. The company claimed it was fulfilling a social need by helping remote communities and got state subsidies based on the distance the trains traveled. They then increased the number of trains on the routes to earn more money despite no passenger demand.<\/p>\n Documents examined by OCCRP show that Dragnea, the powerful Romanian politician and Comana\u2019s old friend, played an important role in advancing Regiotrans\u2019 business. In 2008, Dragnea was the president of the Teleorman county council, the highest political position at the county level in Romania.<\/p>\n Dragnea signed a document granting private companies such as Regiotrans access to the region\u2019s railways. The deal was lucrative for Regiotrans. During the same period of time, between 2007 and 2009, Comana bought six separate properties from Dragnea, paying the politician over $1.2 million cash in total.<\/p>\n Comana paid many times more than the price Dragnea had paid for the properties.<\/p>\n One of the properties was seized by the state. Prosecutors said Comana paid for the properties with money earned illegally and have sought to seize all six, but four have already been sold by Comana\u2019s daughter. One still belongs to her.<\/p>\n Dragnea told reporters he used part of the money to build a house in Alexandria, the capital city of Teleorman county.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But Comana and Dragnea were not just business partners. Their friendship goes way back to their college days, in the mid-1980s, when they lived in the same student dorm on the campus of the Polytechnics University in the Romanian capital of Bucharest.<\/p>\n In an echo of those earlier times, Comana would spend part of the last year of his life sharing a luxurious oceanside villa in Cumbuco with his college buddy, when Dragnea vacationed in the coastal town.<\/p>\n The villa, nicknamed \u201cCasa Grande\u201d by locals, is framed by tall palm trees on 3,280 square meters of land on the Atlantic shore, with a swimming pool and a tennis court. Property records obtained by OCCRP show that the land is registered to a company that belongs to another old pal of Dragnea\u2019s, Mugurel Gheorghia\u0219.<\/p>\n In contrast, Gheorghia\u0219 lives in an apartment in a modest Communist-era block of flats in a small Romanian town.<\/p>\n Dragnea and Gheorghia\u0219 also met in college in Bucharest. They played together in a rock band called Ego. Dragnea was the drummer while Gheorghia\u0219, nicknamed \u201cMelcu,\u201d (The Snail) played guitar.<\/p>\n In 2010, Gheorghia\u0219 established a local company in Brazil, M&J Investimentos Tur\u00edsticos LTDA, in order to purchase the property in Cumbuco for about $730,000.<\/p>\n Much of the business conducted by Gheorghia\u0219 seemed to be structured in a way that made his friend Dragnea the end beneficiary. He established the company with a Brazilian partner, Cauby Cursinio Campos Junior, 37, who got one percent of the firm. Campos would also play an important role in Comana\u2019s businesses four years later when he was picked by Comana to be a minority shareholder in two Brazilian companies he formed in 2014: Regiotrans Fabricacao de Locomotivas and Robra Ltda.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.riseproject.ro\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/PHOTO_COMANA_PAULO_ALBERTO2.jpg\")
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Dragnea\u2019s First Million<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\nCollege friends and rock band buddies<\/h2>\n
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