Jerusalem – Romanian news outlets published on Sunday, April 10th, the photos of two Israeli nationals arrested by Romanian police for espionage and other alleged crimes .
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The two men, Ron Weiner and David Geclowicz, are employees of the Israeli cyber and intelligence private contractor Black Cube. They were arrested on Wednesday, April 6th and charged with espionage and cyber crimes.
“The suspects established an organized network to carry out serious crimes, including cyber crimes, attempts to steal information, email hacking, and intimidation,” stated Romanian authorities on Wednesday.
Several Romanian media outlets also published claims that the two Israelis are former Mossad agents though these claims have not been corroborated by any reliable source.
The Black Cube employees allegedly spied on National Anticorruption Directorate Chief-Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi and roughly 20 individuals tied to Kövesi, including friends and family members.
Kövesi is known for her tough approach to political corruption and was appointed to a second term in March. Kövesi’s team prosecuted over a thousand high-level cases in 2015, some of which revealed the involvement of Israeli businesspeople and public figures in Romanian corruption schemes.
Black Cube confirmed that the two were working in Romania and stated that “the company has been working with official government agencies in Romania in recent weeks to collect evidence of serious corruption in the Romanian governmental system. As part of the project, two of the company’s employees, who reached significant achievements, were arrested. The employees worked in accordance with local law and the allegations against them are untrue. We are confident that the truth will emerge in the coming days and they will be released back to their homes.”
Black Cube is one of Israel’s more successful private contractors in the cyber intelligence field with undertakings and contracts spanning from Pakistan to the United Kingdom. The company employs many veterans of the IDF intelligence corps and the national intelligence community and maintains an extremely secretive client list.
“We walk a very fine line, sometimes we cross that line by mistake. It happens in life and in the intelligence world,” Professor Asher Tishler, member of the Black Cube board of directors said in an interview with The Financial Times in March.
In another article about the intelligence firm in the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Haharonoth, an unnamed client of Black Cube is quoted as saying “The idea behind this company is that everyone in the business world has skeletons in his or her closet, and they know how to get to these skeletons.”