My name is Romania

I am a modern European state, but I have one of the EU's worst corruption problems - a problem that has stained politics and public life for decades and undermined faith in government and state institutions. I suffered for many, many years because of important people that can do whatever they want and not get punished. After Bulgaria, I have the EU's second-highest rate of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

I'm uncomfortable with the anti-corruption battle taking place here and the main reason is that for some years the investigations by the Anti-Corruption Agency have also involved the Main Secret Service. Our Intelligence is a secret organization which even under the conditions of a democracy keeps things secret. They carry on a huge manipulation of the media.

The new president, Klaus Iohannis (whilst mayor of a Transylvanian city) falsely obtained property in a process known as "retrocedation" - whereby land or buildings seized by the communists are returned to the families of their former owners. Basically all his wealth is based on forgery. Based on a forged document he managed to get hold of this property. He rented that property out to a bank and with that money out of that rent he bought more property and he got more rent and he grew rich.

Criminals exploiting the "retrocedation" system are a big part of the problem, because forests seized and nationalised by the communists are 'returned' to bogus landowners, who then strip them of wood for sale to timber mills. An Austrian timber company, Schweighofer has been accused by environmentalists and others of being on the receiving end of illegally retroceded timber. What is known for sure is that the state forest authority, is Schweighofer's most important supplier and that the forest authority has been implicated in several cases of corruption over the years involving the transfer of a massive stretch of pristine forest away from the state to bogus landowners. The area in question is 43,000 hectares, the size of some English counties.

The current active political class is in one way or another going down. The problem is who is going to replace them, because you can't do without political parties and politicians, and unfortunately the problems which generate corruption are so deeply rooted in the way politics works in this country that it's hard for me to imagine that the new ones are going to be any different from the old ones. It's almost as if citizens accept and expect politicians to be corrupt.

To be continued (if you like it).