WikiLeaks: Ponta, Iohannis and Ungureanu – in the emails of President Erdogan’s party

Romania is mentioned in 99 of the 294,548 emails from the internal server of the governing party in Turkey, which were released by WikiLeaks. Former Prime Minister Victor Ponta, known for close ties with the current regime in Ankara, appears in three emails. In one of them are mentioned President Klaus Iohannis and the current SIE head Mihai Razvan Ungureanu.

The emails are mainly used for “managing the foreign affairs” and not for sensitive internal issues, WikiLeaks said, according to digi24.ro.

Victor Ponta, for example, is mentioned in a Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research report mailed in October 2015 before the general elections in Turkey. The mentioned document makes a review of the situation in the region, focusing on fiscal policy.

About Romania it is said that the National Bank is expected to maintain the level of the policy rate at the time. The economy was on the rise, but the Goldman Sachs Global Investment analysts had drawn attention to a central bank’s possible change of tone.

Another email mentions the appointment as director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SIE) of Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, a former prime minister and foreign minister. In this context, Victor Ponta said he was not consulted by President Klaus Iohannis on the subject, according to the source, which recalls the PSD had boycotted the vote in Parliament.

Ungureanu was appointed on June 30, 2015 as SIE Director by the Parliament plenum with 278 votes ‘for’ and six ‘against’, out of’ the total of 284 valid ballots.

Victor Ponta appears in an email from the fall of 2014 that mentions a series of meetings Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had at the UN. Among the interlocutors were included Victor Ponta, Italian PM Matteo Renzi and the president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

Julian Assange’s organization has posted on Twitter a link to a database which allegedly contains a total of 294,548 e-mails and ‘thousands’ of attachments from 762 addresses related to the AKP, akparti.org. tr.