If you ever wondered who runs the companies that provide internet in Romania, well a European project titled Who are the gatekeepers? investigated the people behind the largest Internet service provider companies in Eastern Europe.
The results of the project were presented the other day in a conference organized in Brussels, and in it there are details about the people and companies that control the Internet service providers in Romania, all the big players on the market being investigated.
As you already know very well, RCS & RDS is the largest internet service provider on the Romanian market, and the control of the company has Zoltan Teszari, one of Romania's billionaires, very skillfully avoiding public life and related scandals.
Although official Zoltan Teszari owns shares that add up to only 1.57% from the total of those issued by RCS & RDS, he controls Cable Communications Systems NV which owns 57.87% of RCS & RDS shares, so it basically controls the internet, television, telephone service providers, etc.
Romania's internet ownership includes controversial businessmen and politically connected figures. In many cases, the ownership is not clear because it is lost in a maze of offshore companies. Romania's wireless and cable telecommunications market has 1,244 authorized providers of electronic communications services and networks.
Whether we talk about RCS & RDS, or about Orange, Telekom, Vodafone, Media Sat, UPC, NextGen or Focus Sat, in the case of all Internet service providers, there are hundreds of offshores involved in controlling the companies and connections with the political environment.
According to the results of the project Who are the gatekeepers?, 66% of Internet service providers in Romania carry out their activity in a non-transparent way, 66% have connections with the political environment and 40% are involved in various ongoing processes.
Those involved in the project Who are the gatekeepers? claim that Romania is a labyrinth of offshores when it comes to Internet service provider companies, and this ultimately leads to a lack of accountability in front of justice and dissatisfied customers with services.
