BUCHAREST -- Stefan Godei, who was once a driver for the former Bucharest mayor, made a cool 3.7 million Romanian lei ($780,000) between November 2021 and June 2023, some of which he allegedly spent on drugs, prostitutes, and hiring musicians. On one night alone, he reportedly splashed out around 25,000 lei ($5,300) on entertainment.
Godei, who was arrested by the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) on July 5, was not dealing drugs or counterfeiting money. He was running care homes for disabled and elderly people.
After journalists from the capital's Buletin de Bucuresti and the Center for Media Investigations published an exposé in January of Godei's "horror asylums" in Voluntari, a small town on the outskirts of Bucharest, the former driver was arrested for allegedly siphoning off money that was meant for the residents' care.
Godei's St. Gabriel the Brave organization received 30,000 euros ($31,000) a month from Bucharest's third district to care for elderly people in Voluntari. But instead of being well looked after, media reports -- and then police -- revealed that residents at care homes run by Godei were being starved, beaten, drugged, tied to their beds, and denied basic hygiene.
The care homes in Voluntari were just the tip of the iceberg. Godei was just one of 24 people targeted by DIICOT investigators after more disturbing allegations surfaced this spring of widespread abuse and neglect in Romania's care sector. In private institutions across the country, there were reports of residents being beaten, underfed, and left with festering, untreated wounds. In one home, dead bodies were riddled with bedbug bites and maggots around the genitals. The plundering of apartments and ATM cards was common. Residents were often given sedatives to make them sleep for 15 hours and their clothes were sprayed with insecticide to keep lice at bay.
Romania's "horror asylums" has been the country's biggest scandal involving residential care institutions since the exposure of the brutal and systemic abuse at communist-era orphanages -- where children were kept in cages and hundreds, possibly thousands, died due to neglect -- after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.
The revelations, which Romanian President Klaus Iohannis called "a national disgrace," prompted widespread soul-searching, encapsulated by the widely shared social media hashtag #everyoneknew (#totistiau in Romanian). As the dust has settled and some politicians and care-home managers have lost their jobs, further investigations and eyewitness accounts have revealed a fundamentally broken system, where elderly and sick people were viewed as mere assets to be profited from by institutions that prioritized profits over care.
In April 2022, a woman visited a care home in Voluntari and was appalled by what she found. She decided to write to the local prefect, Simona Neculae, the top official in the county.
"The old people haven't been washed for months. Employees are screaming that they caught lice from patients who have wounds from scabies. Where can I make a complaint to save them? We can't just sit here and do nothing," the woman, who wasn't named in the original report to protect her identity, wrote to her local official.
Neculae was quick to respond.
"The Ilfov public health authorities. Look on Google," she answered.
Nothing happened. In fact, no response would come for over a year, even as neighbors, the Center for Legal Resources, a 20-year-old NGO that monitors homes for the elderly, continued to complain to the Voluntari town hall and the public health authorities.
Instead of listening, the authorities doubled down. Labor Minister Marius Budai blocked the Center for Legal Resources' access to the care homes and prefect Neculae remained in her job. The St. Gabriel the Brave association, which ran the institutions in Voluntari, said it was suing for defamation the neighbors who complained, asking for 3,000 euros in damages from each of them.
But even after the grisly details of the scandal surfaced earlier this year, dominating media coverage for weeks, and two ministers were forced to resign, there was a collective shrugging of shoulders among local officials, care-home managers, and staff. They claimed they didn't know about the conditions or, if they did, they were unable to do anything about it.
That wasn't good enough for many Romanians, especially those with relatives and loved ones in such institutions. They weren't just angry; they wanted to know how and why something like this could be allowed to happen?
A New Business Model
In 2012, the European Union pushed member Romania to close its huge care homes for people with disabilities, given the country's poor record of institutionalized care. Private businesspeople -- many with links to national or local officials -- began to build smaller care homes, mostly outside urban areas, to accommodate disabled and also elderly people. Newly formed companies or not-for-profit associations would take over the running of the homes and would get money from the local authorities to house, feed, and give medical treatment to the residents they were supposed to care for.
That approach -- of viewing care homes as an attractive moneymaking proposition -- was wrong from the start, said Ovidiu Vanghele, who heads the editorial team at the Center for Media Investigations, which was one of the journalistic teams that broke the initial story.
Vanghele, who has written extensively about the scandal, told RFE/RL's Romanian Service that the authorities closed their eyes to the abuse and allowed friends and associates to make huge profits by exploiting disadvantaged people in their care.
"The idea of having companies doing social welfare is kind of stupid.… It doesn't make sense. The company is profit-orientated and social welfare is anti-profit…from the start," Vanghele said.
"That is how a new business began: the trade of very sick, defenseless people," Vanghele wrote for the Center for Media Investigations. "The state was obliged to pay good money for looking after them."
But in a great number of cases, that money wasn't going to the patients -- or only a fraction of it was.
"The worse the diagnosis, the more the state had to pay. It could be as high as 1,500 euros a month [per person] for the most serious cases," Vanghele told RFE/RL. Many care homes had a physiotherapist, Vanghele said, but only on paper. They had catering companies to provide meals, but no food was ever delivered.
"The catering contract was only on paper. It was a cool contract. It said: We provide food, but it didn't specify how much…and starting from what date. What does such a contract even mean?" Vanghele asked. "How could something like this work and be going on for years without protection? But they kept going because they thought they were protected."
Political Connections
That protection usually came in the form of connections to national or local officials.
Gabriela Firea, the former Bucharest mayor and then Romania's minister of family, youth, and equal opportunities, was forced to resign after her connections to her former driver and now care-home kingpin Godei were exposed. Firea's sister, Nela Vica Andries, was in charge of Voluntari's social services, which were responsible for maintaining standards at care homes. And Firea's close friend and ministry adviser, Ligia Gheorghe, was vice president of St. Gabriel the Brave from 2020 to 2023.
At another care home in Voluntari, the neighbors had noticed strange things happening in recent years.
"Some of [the residents] were quiet. They walked around the yard. Others stood at the gate and begged for a lei or two," retired Olympic athlete Carol Corbu told RFE/RL's Romanian Service.
Another neighbor, Rodica, said she tried to help and regularly brought food for the care home's residents.
"They knew when I'd be coming and they waited for me at the gate. [But] the managers didn't allow them to take food [from us]. Sometimes, they chased them and shouted at them, especially the cook…. They were so thin, you can't imagine. It made you cry. When they came to the gate and said, 'Give me a pretzel, I'm so hungry,' it made your heart break," Rodica told RFE/RL's Romanian Service. "Everyone knew what was going on. [Voluntari Mayor Florin] Pandele, Firea (who is married to Pandele) live just around the corner."
Despite the involvement of the private sector, it is local authorities in Romania that are ultimately responsible for the conditions and residents' welfare in the care homes. But in cases documented in Romanian media, unscrupulous local officials saw the privatization of the industry as a moneymaker and began to work closely with the new companies that would be providing the care. Not only could those officials potentially get a share of the profits, they could also hand out lucrative business opportunities to family and friends.
With such mutually beneficial arrangements in place, local officials across Romania neglected their duties of overseeing the conditions in the care homes.
"The sum of money is so high for patients that [care-home] operators want to make the maximum profit, and there is a general lack of [oversight]," Cristian Parvulescu, dean of the Bucharest-based National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, told RFE/RL.
There was a man who visited his father several times [after] informing the home first. Once he came unannounced [and his father] was naked, had been beaten, and had fallen off the bed."
"Some residents' families don't care, or they are far away, or abroad. In some cases, [the care homes] stopped relatives visiting," he said.
Parvulescu also blamed the companies running the care homes for hiring untrained staff that lacked the skills to look after the residents.
"Some of [the staff] were violent [with residents] as they didn't have the training," he said, blaming authorities for their inadequate oversight.
"There was a man who visited his father several times [after] informing the home first. Once he came unannounced [and his father] was naked, had been beaten, and had fallen off the bed," Parvulescu said. It's a lack of humanity, he said. "Parts of society believe that these people are old and will just die [anyway]."
Many Romanians, however, think quite the opposite: Not only do they care about the fate of society's elderly and infirm, they also want to know what will be done in the future to prevent such a thing from happening again.
In response to the crisis, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu ordered care homes around the country to be checked and fired the heads of several institutions that report to the Labor Ministry for negligence in office. He later announced that 99 care homes had been shut down around the country, including 44 in Bucharest for not meeting health and safety standards.
At one care home for disabled people in the central Romanian county of Valcea, a man was hurriedly buried in July without an autopsy, just before an official audit. A criminal probe is now under way.
Across the country, care-home residents whose health was suffering, often due to the appalling conditions in which they were living, were sent to stay in hospitals. Others went back to their relatives. The Labor Ministry said on August 9 that 600 people had been rehoused with their families, in hospitals or in care homes with "decent facilities" after checks were carried out. Thirty people from homes in Voluntari and nearby Afumati were taken either to the hospital or other care facilities in Bucharest. The medics who treated them said they had never seen people so skeletal due to starvation.
On September 19, the Labor Ministry announced a plan, under a new law, to oblige companies who run care homes to reinvest 90 percent of their profits in developing social services. Some 200 institutions would come under the new legislation, which some businesses in the sector are reportedly not happy about.
The scandal has also raised questions about European Union funding. A Romanian member of the European Parliament, Alin Mituta, made a written complaint in July to the European Commission, the EU's executive body, criticizing the Romanian government's response and saying that the abuse of elderly and disabled people violated the bloc's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
On September 6, Mituta said he had received a response from the commission which, according to the deputy, "said that the mistreatment of old people is unacceptable, and the commission will have a dialogue with the Romanian government and will monitor the situation."
The EU has made available "400 million euros for vulnerable people" between 2021 and 2027, Mituta said, money that is paid directly to the state.
"The European Commission said the way [Romania obtains] these funds in the future will be strictly monitored," he added.
"I have no mercy for the scoundrels who created these horror asylums," the prime minister said after the scandal broke, adding that the problem was systemic and pointed to corruption. "Such villains, such cruelty, totally dehumanized people."
Despite Ciolacu's stern words and the steps the government has taken, there are still doubts about whether the broken system can be fixed.
"For a while, things will get better, but then there will be the natural tendency to backslide. If there are no checks [on the homes], the situation will be repeated," Parvulescu said.
