When a Romanian businessman returned to his hometown and found a city blighted by mining waste, he hatched a plan to restore it to its former glory. He became a local hero, but now prosecutors accuse of him a running a multimillion dollar fraud
The first time I heard the name Daniel Boldor, I was in Bucharest in a room full of police officers. A discussion about wealthy countries shipping their waste to poorer countries had turned to what Romania – one of the major recipients of Europe’s trash – was doing to fight back. Strict surveillance was being conducted at ports, the officers affirmed, and cargo trucks were undergoing checks. And then one of the policemen asked if I had ever heard the story of Daniel Boldor. For a moment, his colleagues awkwardly scanned the floor with their eyes, as if the officer had made some kind of gaffe. Yes, they seemed to eventually nod in agreement, a sense of enthusiasm overtaking the table. It was an extraordinary story.
It sounded like a fairytale. Some years earlier, hundreds of miles north of Bucharest, deep in the mountains of Transylvania, a Roma man claimed to have discovered a great lost treasure: thousands of tonnes of gold and copper that had been dug up decades earlier, then forgotten. His name was Daniel Boldor, and he had a plan. He found investors across the world. He paid his fellow Roma to gather the metal for him. Then he began selling his treasure. Buyers from South Africa to South Korea proved willing to pay tremendous sums of money for it.
