Romanian President Traian Basescu intervened for about an hour in a live TV talk-show on the Antena 3 news channel on Tuesday evening to answer accusations one newspaper brought against him that he had destroyed his Securitate files in the 1989 Revolution.
Newspaper Adevarul on Tuesday re-launched older allegations by a journalist from the port city of Constanta that Basescu, former captain of Communist Romania’s commercial fleet flagship, destroyed his Securitate files during the Revolution.
The allegations were the subject of the talk-show on Antena 3, in the presence of two well-known journalists including Adevarul editor-in-chief Corina Dragotescu.
In his live intervention, Basescu accepted that in his position at the time he had to be in touch with Nicolae Ceausescu’s dreaded secret police, the Securitate, but said he was not an informer and did not have a Securitate file.
And he said newspaper Adevarul had become the propagator of a “big lie”, aimed at him as he was the one who dared to lift the secrecy of Securitate files.
