An oil fortune bound in red tape

U.S. investor, partner get entangled on Romania’s path to open markets

G. Philip Stephenson does not cut the figure of an Eastern European oil baron, clashing with formerly communist security officials over the legality of his budding empire.

Stephenson is a talkative, Texas-bred lawyer and former U.S. Treasury official who in the past four years has tried, with some success, to create a personal fortune from the privatization of Romania’s oil industry. But his success has drawn the attention of Romanian prosecutors and demonstrated the potential and pitfalls of private investment in developing economies in Eastern Europe.
Last year, he and Dinu Patriciu, his Romanian partner in Rompetrol Group NV, that country’s second-largest oil company, became the targets of a criminal investigation in Bucharest. Patriciu has spent a day in jail, and Stephenson has been publicly identified as a target of the investigation.

The story of how Stephenson became a target of Romanian anti-corruption officials began in Washington 13 years ago. The mixing of politics and money in the 1990s gave rise to a number of private investment partnerships here — Carlyle Group being the most prominent — that helped change Washington careers and fortunes.

Washington Post