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What is the most corrupt institution in present-day Romania? Nope, it's not the Government. It's not the Parliament. It's not the Ministry of Justice. It's not even the DNA (the National Direction Against Corruption). It's not the Department of Forestry. It's not even the National Hunting and Fishing Association. It's not a hospital and it's not a school. I'll cut to the chase.
It's the CFR, the National Railroad Company.
Well, that's my opinion, at least, and I will soon tell you why. I'm not talking about high-level corruption involving high-ranking officials in the company and weird deals involving their relatives. I'm talking about a kind of corruption which is so well embedded into the way things work that it might well be part of the bases of the whole organization.
Here's the story. We went on a weekend trip to Sibiu. I might cover why we went by train in another post, although that's really not important. We got to the train station arount 23:00 on Friday evening and our train was due to leave at 23:50. We went to buy our tickets, which we did, and we also wanted 2 beds on the sleeping car. The lady at the ticket office told us they were changing information systems and she couldn't give us the beds although she still had the diagram, but that as usual we should be able to get tickets from the steward on the train. Now, I knew this meant the steward would ask for a bit more money than the ticket actually cost, usually about 10 RON more, but this time it was a lot better. We had to beg the guy to give us 2 beds on a virtually empty sleeping car and you can bet he didn't issue any kind of ticket, not even for the nominal cost of the beds. And when the discussion ended it was obvious he was just ... doing us a favour.
When we got back it was even more interesting. This time the sleeping car was full so the steward told us to wait in another car until the train got to Fagaras when two of the beds would be freed. OK, reasonable enough. After a few calculations we decided it wasn't worth paying for 2 beds for the 4 hours that were left till we got to Bucharest so we waited for the regular controller to ask him to issue us tickets for 2 regular 2nd class seats. Well, surprisingly enough, the controller had already talked to the steward and they had decided that the beds weren't available anymore (just in case we still wanted them). I mean, the controller has to live too, doesn't he? We thought: "OK, no more shady business with the steward. Let's just get those tickets for the seats.". But no, the controller told us he thought it was better if we just paid him a bit more than the price of the seats so that he could "manage" to leave us the entire compartment to ourselves so we could sleep on the benches all the way to Bucharest. It didn't really seem like we had a choice. And guess what: no tickets...
Add this little story to what usually happens on most trains, especially slow trains, and you have a pretty good picture of what I mean. I'm talking here about the 1 to 5 ratio (tickets bought to people actually travelling on a train) which frequently checks out, especially on the commuter trains.
FINAL NOTE and DISCLAIMER: I am by no means admitting to paying any bribes to any employees of the National Railroad Company. I am simply trying to give a fair and accurate account of how on two consecutive occasions I was asked to pay for the services of the National Railroad Company by their employees and was not issued an official document confirming the receipt of the money.
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