Nordis Mamaia Wave, real estate disaster: 212 promises of sale without object and dozens of missing homes

The luxury residential project Nordis Mamaia Wave is proving to be a real estate failure according to the analysis provided to the press yesterday by CITR, the judicial administrator of Nordis Management SRL. The document sent to the Editors shows that 212 promises of sale have remained without object, because the units have already been sold to other people or have been re-compartmentalized, physically disappearing in the new configurations, and for another 46 people the company refuses to honor the promises of sale, despite the fact that the judicial administrator believes that the obligation to hand over the properties subsists.

The picture of the disaster has been documented over the last seven months by CITR, which meticulously analyzed the Nordis Mamaia Wave project, an analysis that included over 2,937 document folders, data from the Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising Office and from the courts, and reconstructed the route of each unit from the moment of construction to registration in the land register and the signing of contracts.

The result that emerges from the CITR analysis is devastating: overlapping conventions, multiple promises for the same unit, apartments sold two or even three times, re-compartmentalizations made without informing the promisors, transformations of apartments into offices or technical spaces, all in an operational chaos that left dozens of people without the homes they paid for.

Of the total of 1,408 conventions examined, 709 units had already been transferred to third parties, definitively leaving the company's assets. Another 653 units had promises of sale and purchase, but here the picture breaks down in two: 441 of them are promises considered valid, which can be executed in the insolvency procedure, and the remaining 212 are promises completely empty of content, in which buyers were attracted with worthless documents, while the properties were either already sold or no longer existed in the promised form after aggressive re-compartmentalizations. In 46 cases, the dispute is internal: the judicial administrator (CITR) claims that the obligation to hand over exists, while the special administrator disputes it, practically blocking the completion of the transactions.

The cases are of a severity rarely encountered in a real estate project of such magnitude. CITR discovered situations in which the same unit was promised successively to several people, without the previous promisees being notified, concluding contracts upon contracts. In other cases, the developer changed the internal structure of the building: two-room apartments were transformed into two studios, put on sale separately, or into commercial or technical spaces, canceling the initial promises. Apartments promised to buyers were identified that later disappeared altogether, becoming offices or technical rooms, which makes it impossible to hand them over in contractual form.

In parallel with the promises that remained without object, the project contains 303 housing units and 109 technical and commercial spaces considered available, some mortgaged, for which there are no active promises. They are, practically, the only assets left unaffected in this thicket of overlapping contracts.

This whole situation explodes in an already fraught legal context: the insolvency of Nordis Management SRL, opened on October 7, 2024, involves 1,228 creditors and a requested creditor mass of over 900 million lei, of which 721 million lei are accepted. Over 600 litigations are ongoing, which makes this file one of the most complex insolvency cases in the recent Romanian real estate market.

In the next stage, CITR will individually analyze the claims of the promisors with valid promises and will try to find solutions for those left without the object of the agreement. For the latter, the debtor company proposed the assignment of an equivalent unit, but only with the consent of the injured person. The judicial administrator emphasizes that the objective remains the protection of creditors and total transparency of the legal situation.

At the heart of this scandal, however, remains a shocking reality: hundreds of people paid for homes that will either never belong to them again, or no longer exist in the promised form. Nordis Mamaia Wave thus becomes a cruel example of a systemic failure, in which the developer's promises collapsed under the weight of its own practices, and customers were left to bear the consequences. The judicial administrator continues the analysis and invites all creditors to dialogue, but for those who have lost their investments, trust can no longer be recovered as easily as documents in a file.

NOTE:

In October 2024, a journalistic investigation published by Recorder reported that the Nordis company, controlled by Vladimir Ciorbă (husband of former MP Laura Vicol), had collected hundreds of millions of euros from clients for apartments in a series of real estate projects, but the deliveries were not made, moreover, there were indications that the units promised to the initial customers had been sold several times.

Subsequently, in February 2025, DIICOT prosecutors ordered searches (around 70 addresses) and detained 11 people, including Vladimir Ciorbă and Laura Vicol, on charges such as organized criminal group, embezzlement with particularly serious consequences, money laundering, tax evasion and fraud with particularly serious consequences.

In the fall of 2025, the investigation was expanded after over 300 new criminal complaints were registered, which brought the additional estimated damage to around 35.8 million euros, and the total damage calculated by the prosecutors reached around 75 million euros. The investigation includes around 700 complaints and 850 people with the status of victims.

In this case, the defendants - including Vladimir Ciorbă and other shareholders of the group - are being prosecuted for forming an organized criminal group and embezzlement. The court decided that the persons under criminal investigation should be tried at liberty, with preventive measures, after appeals were made against the preventive arrest measure. The criminal case, coordinated by DIICOT, targets the companies Nordis Management SRL and Nordis Mamaia SRL, along with individuals from the management and shareholders of the group.

In order to recover the damage, the prosecutors imposed the seizure of some real estate, land, apartments, bank accounts, some of these measures being lifted by the court.