Maltese police were closing in on their royal target. 

On a cloudy April afternoon in the Mediterranean, four plain-clothes police officers strode up to the entrance of the palatial Westin Dragonara resort to arrest one of its guests.

Prince Paul of Romania had just pulled up to the five-star hotel — a pink-and-cream, neoclassical building, like an oversized Barbie Dreamhouse, with a private beach and rooms costing up to €5,000 a night — and was stepping out of his car when the officers stopped him.

They were executing a European Arrest Warrant, they told the prince, and he would need to leave with them. Paul protested his innocence, and asked to go to his room to get documents that would prove it before they took him away. But the officers refused to budge.

“They didn’t listen to me, they just carried me off into the car to be arrested,” he told POLITICO in a phone interview from Malta, where he was forced to remain for months as the subject of a legal tug-of-war between EU countries.

The arrest kicked off the latest chapter in an extraordinary legal saga, spanning decades and multiple European countries. At its center is Paul, the 76-year-old grandson of one of Romania’s last kings, who has been hunted across the Continent over his role in a scheme to illegally reclaim royal lands that belonged to his ancestor.

Others involved in the plot include an Israeli diamond tycoon, the former chief of staff of a Romanian prime minister who was once locked up for corruption, and a battery of bribe-taking bureaucrats.

POLITICO spoke exclusively to the prince, his wife and his lawyers, and pored over thousands of pages of legal documents, court judgments and transcripts of wiretapped conversations, to unravel a complex and often bizarre tale of succession and deception involving one of Europe’s most obscure royal families.

Classmates with King Charles

Just under an hour’s drive north of Bucharest lies the sprawling Snagov Forest. Wildcats prowl the branches of its towering beech trees, and deer and wild boar drink from its long, serpentine lake. A bridge connects to a small island on the lake, allowing tourists to visit a medieval monastery famed for its claim to be the final resting place of Vlad the Impaler, the 15^th century warlord and Romanian national hero who was the inspiration for Dracula.

Part of the forest once belonged to Romania’s King Carol II, who reigned for a decade between 1930 and 1940. It was confiscated, as were all royal lands, during World War II by the fascist government and then the ruling communists, who abolished the monarchy in 1947. 

Romania’s defunct royal family would spend more than 40 years in exile, scattered across Europe — including Paul, who was born in Paris in 1948 to Mircea Hohenzollern, the eldest son of King Carol II, and a commoner woman. Their marriage was annulled shortly after Paul’s birth.

Paul was raised in France and educated at elite boarding schools in the United Kingdom — he was in the same year as King Charles, to whom he is distantly related, at Gordonstoun — and did not set foot in Romania until he was in his early 40s. 

Paul and his wife Lia, pictured in 2023. | Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images

A homecoming only became possible in 1989, when Romanians shook off half a century of communist rule in a short, violent revolutionary spasm that culminated in the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife on Christmas Day.

With the fall of communism, Paul — who was not a Romanian citizen, though his British passport, seen by POLITICO, lists his full name as Paul Philip of Romania — immediately returned to the country his forefathers once ruled. He joined a British aid flight to Bucharest in January of 1990, and later moved to the capital with his American-born wife, Lia.

But the return of the exiled prince, a fine art dealer who did not speak Romanian, was not popular with everyone. Though the monarchy was never restored, the government gave the popular main branch of the royal family — led first by Paul’s uncle, King Michael I, and today by the king’s daughter, Margareta — a ceremonial role, allowing them to use the Elisabeta Palace in Bucharest as their official residence. Similar arrangements have been made between governments and defunct royal families elsewhere, such as Montenegro.

Paul, however, is estranged from King Michael I’s side of the family. Despite decisions by Portuguese and French courts in the 1950s and 1960s recognizing his father as the legitimate son of King Carol II, and a Romanian court confirming Paul’s royal lineage in 2012, his royal claim has never been fully accepted in his ancestral country, including by his extended family, owing to the annulment of his grandfather’s marriage to his grandmother.

But that didn’t stop him from trying to carve out a role for himself in Romanian public life. The prince ran for president of Romania in 2000, but won just 50,000 votes, or about 0.5 percent of the turnout. Denied a palace of their own, he and Lia subsequently turned their five-story manor in Bucharest into a sort of shadow royal court, hosting dignitaries, ambassadors and minor celebrities.

When a wealthy businessman with connections to Romania’s former prime minister approached Paul with an offer to help him reclaim old royal lands, it was a golden opportunity to assert his title once and for all.

Enter the Steinmetz

In 2006, Remus Truică, once chief of staff to corruption-plagued former Prime Minister Adrian Năstase, invited Paul and his wife to his lakeside property near Snagov Forest.

At the lavish villa, according to court documents seen by POLITICO, Truică — himself a powerful businessman and millionaire — offered them a deal. 

His company, Reciplia SRL, could help recover Paul’s disputed ancestral lands — Snagov Forest and Băneasa Royal Farm, a former crown estate near Bucharest — on the prince’s behalf and pay him an advance of €4 million, if Paul signed over 50 to 80 percent of the properties to Reciplia in return. The lands, highly sought after by developers, were worth a combined total of €145 million, according to the Romanian authorities.

Truică assured the prince he had sway over local officials and the press, and that any politician who stood in their way “would not be re-elected,” according to court documents.

Paul told POLITICO that Truică “had a very good curriculum vitae in property and investment,” and that he did not suspect the deal would break any laws. The prince agreed to the arrangement, pocketing the advance within weeks.

Cracks in the relationship appeared when Paul learned Truică was part of a group with an Israeli billionaire, Benyamin Steinmetz, and his right-hand man, Tal Silberstein, who would go on to be a political adviser to Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern. In reality, it was Steinmetz, a mining tycoon with a fortune originally made from African diamonds, who was the real financier of the plan to reclaim the old royal lands, not Truică, as Paul had been led to believe. Reciplia was nearly 90 percent owned by Steinmetz, with Truică a minor shareholder, per court documents.

Snagov Monastery, Romania, is famed for its claim to be the final resting place of Vlad the Impaler, the 15th century warlord and Romanian national hero. | iStock

Paul was spooked. “We didn’t know that we had them as partners,” he said, referring to the Israelis. He didn’t like what he’d heard about Steinmetz, who was once Israel’s richest man, before his business dealings in Africa came under scrutiny and led to charges of bribery and corruption. Paul tried to “get out” of the deal at that point, he claimed, but to no avail.

The relationship between the prince, Truică and Steinmetz fractured irrevocably once Paul received ownership of Snagov Forest and Băneasa Royal Farm and signed both properties over to Reciplia, as agreed. Paul said he heard little from his partners after the transfer was completed in 2009 and didn’t receive his promised share of the sale of the assets. He went so far as to threaten to report them to the police, which led to a rare intervention from Steinmetz himself.

To assuage the prince’s concerns, Steinmetz — who was “rarely present in Romania” according to court documents, preferring to play his part in the plot “from the shadows” — met Paul face-to-face at the prince’s home in Bucharest on a cold December night in 2011. 

“We are serious persons, consider us very serious, honest people,” Steinmetz told the prince, according to a transcript of a secret recording of the conversation. “Our only motivation here is that we want to invest a great deal of money in this business, while keeping a low profile.” He asked the prince to be patient; his money was coming.

But as more time passed, Paul’s patience ran out. Worried he was being “cheated,” he told POLITICO, he finally went to the police in 2015 to file a complaint. “I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong,” he said. “I felt I’m the one who didn’t get my properties back.”

By that point, the authorities were already closing in on the prince, Truică, Steinmetz and a group of conspirators, including lawyers for the three men and a host of corrupt local officials, involved in the illegal restitution of the old royal lands.

Long arm of the law

As the fog rolled into a quiet residential street in Bucharest on a chill December morning in 2020, the police pounded on the door of Paul’s home. Romania’s highest court had just convicted in absentia the prince and his conspirators of corruption, overturning an earlier acquittal and handing them prison sentences ranging from three to seven years behind bars. The officers were there to take him in.

Paul’s wife, Lia, answered the door at about 5.30 a.m. and informed them he wasn’t home. He had gone on a trip to Portugal, she said, and she didn’t know when he would be back. Shortly after that, a photo of the prince appeared on Interpol’s website. He was officially a wanted man.

The High Court of Cassation and Justice judgment, which is hundreds of pages long and was obtained by POLITICO in both Romanian and English, explains the murky methods by which Paul’s conspirators used their connections to get local officials to transfer ownership of the properties to the prince. 

In one example, Truică waited until the director of a forestry department was replaced with a friend, and then asked his friend to grant possession of Snagov Forest to the prince in exchange for 1,000 square meters of the land, worth €50,000. In another, Truică bribed the head of an agricultural institute with a trip to Monaco, taking the official and his wife to a Michelin-starred restaurant in Monte Carlo and on a boat ride.

Transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations between Steinmetz and Truică show that the Israeli billionaire was eager to take possession of the Romanian royal lands, asking for regular updates.

Speaking to Truică in October 2007 from Belgrade, Steinmetz boasted: “Snagov is ours.”

And in May 2008, Truică reassured Steinmetz that the other property, Băneasa Royal Farm, would also soon belong to them once local officials agreed to grant the land to Paul.

“And afterwards is it really ours?” Steinmetz asked him.

“Yes, it’s 100 percent ours, it’s like your car, it’s yours,” Truică replied, laughing.

Paul’s role in the plot was more limited but no less central, according to the authorities. “Although he was not a member of the organized criminal group” who did the dirty work of bribing officials, “he was part of the group of interests that revolved around him and which aimed at illegally entering into possession of assets belonging to the Romanian State,” the court found.

Paul’s royal claim has never been fully accepted in his ancestral country. Pictured presiding over “Miss Transylvania 2002” contest. | David Greedy/Getty Images

“Driven by the desire to enrich himself, by invoking the connection with the former King Carol II, and knowing that the claimed goods could not be obtained legally, the defendant [Paul of Romania] agreed” to be part of the plot, which cost the state €145 million, the value of the land.

Ultimately, the list of people convicted in the plot is as long as it is bizarre. 

It includes Paul, Romania’s shadow prince; a corrupt former prime minister’s chief of staff, Truică; the Israeli diamond billionaire, Steinmetz; and a slew of local officials who accepted bribes in exchange for transferring dozens of hectares of land owned by the state to Paul. All of them, Romania’s highest court ruled, were variously involved in a sophisticated scheme to swindle the country out of land once owned by its king. In total, 19 were convicted and sentenced to prison.

A spokesperson for Romania’s anti-corruption agency, which prosecuted the case, told POLITICO the investigators who worked on the probe are no longer at the agency and declined an interview request.

Paul was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, Truică was sentenced to seven years and put behind bars, and Steinmetz was sentenced to five years. He was arrested in Greece and then Cyprus, where he successfully fended off Romanian extradition requests on the grounds that the conditions in Romania’s prisons were inhumane, according to the Athens and Nicosia court judgments, which were obtained by POLITICO.

A lawyer for Steinmetz told POLITICO that the conviction was “flawed and politically driven.”

“Romania now stands isolated and discredited. It is time for the Romanian authorities to end this baseless political persecution and for its judicial system to regain credibility and international respect,” the lawyer added. 

Truică did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

The police did eventually catch up with Paul — not in Portugal, but in his native France, stopping him on a Paris street in June 2022. The Romanian authorities had issued a European Arrest Warrant, meaning he could be detained anywhere in the EU and extradited to Romania.

Paul and his lawyers sought to have the extradition request refused. They portrayed his conviction as political persecution by overzealous and prejudiced prosecutors, complicating what should have been an open-and-shut inheritance case. He was indisputably the biological grandson of King Carol II, they argued, and therefore the rightful heir to the deceased monarch’s lands. They also seized on a procedural irregularity in the case: Two of the Romanian judges who convicted Paul had not been properly sworn in.

A French court ruled in Paul’s favor and refused to extradite him to Romania, finding that because the judges had not taken their oath, the prince could not have gotten a fair trial. The prince’s legal team also successfully challenged the Interpol wanted notice, which was deleted. For the time being, at least, he was a free man.

A spokesperson for Romanian Justice Minister Alina-Ștefania Gorghiu denied that the authorities’ pursuit of Paul was politically motivated. Her spokesperson told POLITICO last month that her only goal was to capture all fugitives from the law, “no matter the name of a certain person.”

“I am not beaten”

Paul’s lawyer and confidant of more than a decade, Edward Griffith, had a bad feeling about the prince going to Malta in April this year.

“I had warned him not to go,” the attorney told POLITICO by phone from New York. Despite the win in France, there was still a valid European Arrest Warrant with Paul’s name on it, so he could be arrested in another EU country. He feared that Paul’s “enemies,” pointing to elements in the royal family, would find out about the trip and “tip off the Maltese police to arrest him.” (The royal House of Romania did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.)

But Paul had a good reason to want to visit Malta, a small, sun-kissed island country in the Mediterranean that joined the EU in 2004. He had been appointed to lead the Order of St. John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta — one of several Christian charitable groups bearing the Knights of Malta name, not to be confused with the most famous, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which has stressed it has no connection to Paul — and was to join around 200 European dignitaries and members of the order at a ceremony honoring him.

After the police swooped in and arrested him at the resort, he was whisked to a court hearing where he was denied bail, with the magistrate finding the crimes he was convicted of in Romania were too serious to let him walk free. He spent the next two months behind bars.

The conditions were bare but adequate, he said. “Of course, it’s never very pleasant, especially after being honored, to suddenly find yourself in prison,” he added mildly.

His wife Lia said she visited him as often as she was allowed, kissing him through the prison’s glass partition. Their son, Carol — born in 2010, when Lia was 60 years old — remained at his boarding school in the U.K.

By the time he was bailed in July, Paul’s jet-black hair had turned white. Unable to leave Malta, he took a room at the Radisson Blu hotel near the capital, Valletta, while his lawyers fought a Romanian extradition request. His Maltese lawyer, Jason Azzopardi, was reluctant to disclose Paul’s location to POLITICO, claiming the Romanian authorities might attempt to “kidnap” him. (At the time of publication, Paul is no longer staying at the hotel.)

A month later, on Aug. 12, he received the decision he had been waiting for: Malta’s court of appeal refused to extradite him to Romania on human rights grounds, as it found the conditions in Romania’s prisons were inadequate.

Despite Bucharest sending a delegation of officials from its justice ministry and prison service to argue otherwise, the Maltese court — echoing the earlier decision in France, as well as those for Steinmetz in Cyprus and Greece — was not satisfied that the prince would be safe in Romanian custody. (It did not make a ruling on his claim to be the rightful owner of the royal lands.)

As he stood outside the courthouse in Valletta with his lawyers and supporters, the prince shared his elation in a phone call with POLITICO.

“The one who was wrong is Romania,” he said. “I’m happy that Malta realized what Romania was trying to do … It’s obviously an injustice.” 

With a conviction in Romania and a European Arrest Warrant still hanging over his head, Paul could yet face arrest in 25 EU member countries. After the Maltese decision, Romania’s justice minister furiously vowed to continue pursuing the prince.

But Paul, whose story is intertwined with that of Romania, a nation of almost 20 million that has gone from monarchy to communist dictatorship to EU member country in the past century, said he would not give up on his claim to the old royal lands and added he was ready for the next chapter.

“I am not beaten,” he said. “I am very much in a fighting mood.”