Constantin Vlase, the brother of the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SIE), is in the real estate business with Elvis Petcu, a former defendant in the Beinur clan case, known on the seaside for the underworld scandals of the early 2000s, and with Alexandru Olea, the owner of the Magnum betting and gambling company. Recently, the brothers Constantin and Gabriel Vlase became the godfathers of Alexandru Olea’s wedding and the godparents of his child’s baptism, according to information obtained by G4Media.ro from several guests who attended the two events.
- Constantin Vlase and Alexandru Olea gave almost identical answers to reporters, saying that they have a long-standing friendship and business relationship and that they are interested in doing business, and that their business „is perfectly legal”. Constantin Vlase claims to be Alexandru Olea’s godfather and the godfather of Alexandru Olea’s child’s christening, although witnesses at the events explained to G4Media that the Vlase brothers „shared” the duties of godfathers. Neither Constantin Vlase nor Alexandru Olea explained why and how they came to do business with a member of the Beinur Nuredin clan. Read Constantin Vlase’s full answer here and Alexandru Olea’s full answer here.
- The head of the SIE, Gabriel Vlase, said that „there are aspects that are related to private life”, but that „I have no connection of the kind you have mentioned with Mr. Olea (godfather of marriage/wedding/baptism, ed.) As for his brother’s business dealings and associations, the head of the SIE replied: „I have no connection whatsoever with my brother’s activities”.
- Elvis Petcu could not be contacted by reporters on the phone numbers that appear associated with the companies he belongs to because they are not working or, in the case of one of them, the person who answered the phone said he had not heard of the company or Elvis Petcu.
Constantin Vlase, Alexandru Olea and Elvis Petcu own the company Ace Property Estate, owner of 12 pieces of land in the Comorova Forest, the only one on the coast and which is in the process of being cleared to make way for blocks and hotels in the south of the county, according to an ISE and Context.ro investigation from 2023. The 12 plots of land owned by Vlase and his two associates total almost 3 hectares and belong administratively to the municipality of Mangalia.
The lands owned by Vlase-Olea-Petcu’s firm neighbor those of the former chief prosecutor of Dobrogea, Marian Alexandru (recently enrolled in the PSD), and the family of the former mayor of Mangalia Zanfir Iorguș (ex-PDL, PSD, close to Elena Udrea in the 2000s), who sliced and divided the Comorova Forest in the 2000s. Constantin Vlase and Alexandru Olea claim that they saw in Comorova only a „business opportunity”, that they bought the land legally and without any connection with their neighbors (see details in the full answers above).
The Ace Property Estate company is set up in 2021, is not listed with any employees and has zero turnover for 2023, but debts of almost 2 million lei. According to the termene.ro portal, it presents high commercial risk. Its business is „intermediation in the trade of various products”.
Constantin Vlase, the brother of Gabriel Vlase – the Romanian spy chief, together with Alexandru Olea, also owns the real estate development company AXC Imobiliare Development, set up in 2022, which is not listed with any employees, has a profit of about 35,000 euros in 2023 and debts of almost 1 million euros.
Vlase and Olea own through AXC Imobiliare Development 5 plots of land in the municipality of Bacău (totaling 6.5 hectares). The plots form a leisure area with a go-karting track, grandstand, accommodation, toilets, etc.
Also with Olea (through the company AOL First Holding), Constantin Vlase also owns Eurostar Transcompany, established in 2012 and in whose ownership the reporters did not identify any real estate.
Constantin Vlase single-handedly owns Fast Running, established in 2012, with the business „hotels and other similar accommodation facilities”, a turnover of about €1.2 million (in 2023) and debts of about €1.6 million. The company owns an area of approximately 1.6 hectares in Măgura (Bacău), on which it has a 459 sqm guesthouse, a restaurant and a tourist center with tennis court, swimming pool, football field, etc.
The brother of the head of the SIE still owns, as an individual, in the municipality of Bacău:
- 120 square meters of land and a commercial complex of 315 square meters;
- a 712 sq.m plot of land on which he owns a 4-storey house (ground area of 242 sq.m), plus a swimming pool;
- a plot of 1135 square meters on which several office buildings are built (473 square meters of floor area), but according to Google Maps images, the ground floor of one of the buildings is a hotel, C&C Residence Hotel, which was also the intermediary in the dialog between the reporters and Constantin Vlase;
In Piatra Neamț, Constantin Vlase also owns another property of 72 square meters.
According to information obtained by the reporters from public records, Constantin Vlase also owned 18 plots of land, apartments and buildings in Bacău and Sector 5 in Bucharest, which he has since sold.
Who are Alexandru Olea and Elvis Petcu
Alexandru Olea is shareholder and administrator in 5 companies and administrator in 7 other companies (he was also a partner and administrator in three other companies, which have since been struck off). Three of them represent the gambling and betting group „Magnumbet” (AOL First Holding, Magnum Games and Magnum Betting), one of the largest slot machine companies in the country. Olea is also the president of the Association of Unaffiliated Gambling Partners and Organizers (APONJN).
Alexandru Olea also does business with PSD deputy Mirela Matichescu (in the company Bizarre Food, but they also owned another one with the activity „Restaurants”, which has since been struck off), close to the Radu Mazăre – Nicușor Constantinescu group, but also close to the current PSD Constanta leadership, Felix Stroe and Ion Dumitrache.
According to Dobrogea Live, Matichescu is charged in a DNA case for abuse of power in the workplace. She also appeared in the beach-bar demolition scandal. The company in which she was a shareholder rented two sectors of beach in Năvodari and allegedly erected bars and terraces without authorization, which had to be demolished. After the December 1st elections, Matichescu won a parliamentary seat in the Chamber of Deputies from second place on the PSD Constanța list.
According to her latest declaration of assets, Mirela Matichescu lent Alexandru Olea €100,000.
Elvis Petcu owns three other companies:
- 37% of the company P.N.P. Impex SRL, in which Narcisa Denisa Petcu and Gheorghe Porojan are also shareholders. The company, based in Jupiter, operates in the hotel business and had a turnover of 6 million lei in 2023.
- Petcu is also a partner (with 50% of the shares) in ERRA Bussiness SRL, a company established in 2024 in Mangalia, which deals in rentals and sublets.
- From 2006-2010, Elvis Petcu was the administrator of a company owned by Nuredin Beinur and Ștefan Cătălin Catoiu. PMW SRL was struck off the register in 2023.
In 2010, Petcu was a named party in a case relating to the the Beinur clan, known for the underworld scandals on the coast in the 2000s.
The case was prepared by prosecutor Marian Gherman from the General Prosecutor’s Office and approved for indictment (February 2011) by prosecutor Marius Iacob (who would later become deputy director DNA, under the mandate of Laura Codruța Kovesi).
The indictment states that Beinur Nuredin, the group’s leader, and his „lieutenants”, including Elvis Petcu, were being investigated for extortion, violence, insults and threats. Prosecutors say in the indictment that Nuredin and another defendant are „known in the underworld”:
- „Like the defendant Nuredin Beinur, the defendant Pop Ovidiu Constantin is known in the underworld; he was sent on trial for committing organized crime crimes together with the defendant Clămparu Ion and others. His criminal record shows that he was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for the crime of murder’.
In Elvis Petcu’s case, the prosecutors noted that he had uttered insults and threats and caused destruction against a seaside businessman, thus supporting Beinur Nuredin’s group. Specifically, in the case, the prosecutors charged Petcu with „insulting public morals, disturbing public order and complicity to extortion”, according to the indictment consulted by Info Sud-Est. The prosecutors did not send him to trial together with the other defendants, but split the case and ordered the prosecution to continue in a separate file.
In the end, Beinur, the head of the clan, was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and the other defendants were acquitted.
About Gabriel Vlase, the 2018 head of the Foreign Intelligence Service
G4Media.ro has exclusively revealed that the head of the SIE flew on September 12 by private plane to Baku (Azerbaijan), together with his deputy Ioan Octavian Brita to watch the Formula 1 Grand Prix for three days, as it results from the flight documents (gendec) consulted by G4Media.ro and according to eyewitnesses who saw the two of them in the stands of Baku.
- SIE is among the institutions that provided CSAT with information about the presidential election. The information declassified by the SIE and made public by the Presidential Administration was considered by experts to be the weakest of the set of documents presented by the SRI, SIE, STS and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. See here all the documents declassified by CSAT.
The Foreign Intelligence Service confirmed on Tuesday that the head of the service, Gabriel Vlase, attended three Formula 1 races, in Abu Dhabi, Baku and Monza, but claims that the first two trips were „external missions”, while the visit to Italy was a „private trip, carried out by airliner”. See details here.
Also G4Media showed exclusively in an investigation by journalist Sorin Semeniuc in November 2023 how the head of the SIE made real estate transactions worth over €1 million during his tenure as head of Romanian intelligence.
Among other things, Gabriel Vlase sold a villa to a businessman who has a firm convicted of a criminal offense and bought another one from a businesswoman later implicated in an import suspected of coming from Russia.
Gabriel Vlase sold, during his mandate, for 2.3 million lei, a villa in Bacău and, for prices that G4Media.ro could not find out, a vast property in Dărmănești and an apartment in Sector 5 of Bucharest.
None of this information appeared in his asset declarations, because the transactions were carried out through one of the companies he owns as sole partner, and the law does not require the declaration of contracts signed by his own companies with private firms.
G4Media.ro has discovered that one of the associates of the firm that bought from Vlase the luxury villa in Bacău owns another company which, in 2019, was sentenced definitively to pay a criminal fine of 70,000 lei for the offense of complicity to abuse of power in the office against public interests.
On the other hand, last year, one of Vlase’s firms bought a villa in Tunari from a company owned by an offshore company from the British Virgin Islands whose owner was involved, in November 2023, in a scandal in the Port of Constanta related to an alleged import of fertilizer (urea) from Russia or Belarus, countries under international sanctions in the context of the war in Ukraine.
Vlase became head of the SIE from the position of vice-president of the PSD on July 4, 2018, nominated by President Klaus Iohannis. Gabriel Vlase was voted by a large majority, with 340 votes in favor and only 30 against, all from USR MPs.
Vlase, PSD vice-president, was propelled into politics by Viorel Hrebenciuc. He later became a close associate of the group around Mihai Tudose, the ex-premier who resigned after the conflict with Liviu Dragnea.
After the fall of Tudose, Vlase returned to the political proximity of Liviu Dragnea, who propelled him to the position of vice-president of the PSD at the March 10 congress, as G4Media reported in July 2018.
Vlase was the chairman of the parliamentary commission of control of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He earned a PhD in military and intelligence sciences from the National Intelligence Academy.
Vlase’s name came up in the retrocedes case, in which Viorel Hrebenciuc was sentenced to 2 years in prison, but later acquitted because the offenses were time-barred. Vlase denied that he had anything to do with the case. The press has also mentioned his name in other retroceding scandals since his time as sub-prefect of Bacău (2001-2004).
In a September 2024 investigation published in PressOne, journalist Emilia Șercan speaks of Gabriel Vlase’s „plagiarism with repetition”:
- „(…) he has committed a second plagiarism of big proportions, after the one in the doctoral thesis presented in 2010 at the SRI Academy. This time it concerns a book published in 2012 by RAO,” the journalist notes. Read the full investigation on the plagiarism allegations against the SIE director here.
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