Vivid Lawyer at Large February 2005

Lawyer at Large
If leaving me is easy, coming back is hard

by Oliver Meister
February 2005

Well sort of. Me being Romania, of course. After departing for London in 2000, where the streets are paved with gold (or at least the foundations of my two-bed Clapham flat must be for what I paid for it), I finally succumbed to the lure of Bucharest late last year.

As I am now married I couldn’t blame the decision on Romanian women. As I now earn enough to have been able to buy a property in London it wasn’t the money. Writing this looking out of the 7th floor of the Pro TV building across Bucharest’s rooftops it certainly wasn’t because of the vistas one can enjoy here.

So what is it about Romania that can lure someone from the relative comfort of central (well central-ish) London to Eastern Europe?

Initially I saw upsides in avoiding London public transport (so called because every other member of the public is on it when you are) and better mobility in a city that can be crossed in 20 minutes at the right time of day. New restaurants, cafes, improved parks, the removal of some of the dogs are also enticements.

These are, however, side issues that don’t fully explain why I would abandon a good set up in London where I have family and friends to come to a place that the majority of British people still believe is deprived and/or dangerous. The conclusion I have reached is that the dynamism of the country and the immense possibilities coupled with the stark contrasts that this delivers is why I am here.

Within only six months of being back our business has launched a new television channel, a radio station and we are about to launch a fifth channel in 2005. I have been involved with friends looking to launch construction projects in Romania, export parquet flooring and sending teams of skilled plumbers, carpenters and electricians to the UK to set up joint ventures with property developers there. I have also commissioned a television documentary about the Holocaust in Romania and also completed building one house and am now looking for land to build others. As well as writing for Vivid I will also start weekly articles for Ziarul Financiar this month.

In four years in the UK I managed to hold down ajob and buy a flat. I realised that the enjoyment I gained from the job was due to my regular trips out to Bucharest and Kiev. The established nature of the UK system makes it hard for all but the biggest risk-takers to really achieve much beyond climbing the ladder of whatever organisation one decides to join. The majority of my friends are caught within a system that pays well enough to make it hard to leave without delivering the satisfaction we all hoped for when we started out.

However disorganised and chaotic things can be in Eastern Europe, it is a place where things can happen that take years to achieve back in the UK, if you ever manage them. You can also lose your shirt in Romania, but this tends to happen to those ill-prepared or naïve enough to trust people you simply shouldn’t.

Being a little older and wiser than I was when I left Romania in 2000 we now have people to help us take care of the worst of Romanian bureaucracy and time wasting activities, such as paying bills and taxes. If you take away these minor irritants, life here is actually far more free than the ever more rigid system that we have in the UK.

The downside, if you see it like that, is the stark difference between rich and poor here. This can be encapsulated in a two-day trip we made to Transylvania in November last year. We began by racing one of Romania’s better known robber barons and his new Rolls Royce up the mountains towards Predeal before he and his two BMW outriders outran us.

As we arrived in Poiana Brasov and went to eat at Coliba, our humble Audio A6 was rather outclassed by the Porsches and Bentley Continental GTs that lined the car park. The very next day we drove to the Saxon villages on the way to Sighisoara. Here we came across Roma hamlets where children actually crowded around the car repeatedly pointing to their mouths. Eventually we realised that they were all hungry. Almost all of them were underweight and, although the street was a mud bath and it was no more than five degrees, few had shoes or coats.

In a futile gesture that did little more than assuage my guilt, we went off to the nearest shop and bought it out. Father Christmas, as I was christened by the ladies who owned it, returned to the children who, frighteningly, were delighted to receive nothing more than bread, fruit and chocolate as if I was handing out computer games to English children of a similar age.

Only 20 minutes from these settlements we were dining in an immaculate Sighisoara restaurant with a group of American tourists keen to speak about the standard diet of Dracula/Ceausescu stories.

Oddly, I enjoyed all of the experiences as much as each other. The knowledge that both the super-rich and the extremely poor will eventually wither away to produce a more egalitarian UK-style society is clearly a good thing for the majority of Romanians.

The problem is, I rather like things as they are and, if I am honest, resent the idea that one day these extremes will disappear to produce a more bland and boring society that has now been achieved in Britain. I am more than aware that these bland and boring societies hugely increase the wealth of the poor; I just hope that when this finally happens in Romania the money is spent on more than Sky satellite dishes, Bacardi Breezers and Burberry baseball caps.

Oliver Meister is a director of ProTV.