It was organized by the "Caritas" company of Cluj-Napoca, owned by Ioan Stoica and it was started 1991. Caritas promised eight time the money invested in six months. It attracted 400,000 deponents from all over the country who invested 1,257 billion lei (about a billion USD) before it finally went bankrupt on 14 August1994, having a debt of 450 million USD.
The owner, Ioan Stoica was sentenced in 1995 by the Cluj Courthouse to a total of seven years of prison for fraud, but he appealed and it was reduced to two years, but he went on to the Supreme Court of Justice and it was finally reduced to one year and a half. He is free since 14 June1996.
It is still unknown why the authorities allowed this game to go on and where a large part of the invested money went. The trials between the deponents and the Caritas company still continue, as of 2004.
Focus on aesthetics and global issues in Romania, Israel, and Vietnam.
Continental political philosophy from Kant to Adorno, critical theory, existential phenomenology, post-modernism, and Marxist thought.
Author of Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics (1992), which examines the thought of Augustine, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty, and Critical Theory and Receptive Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas, which explores the work of Kant, Adorno, Habermas, and others.