An interview conducted by Mina Cristiana for Indigo Hub
Dinesh Dhamija first visited Romania in 2006 at the invitation of his brother-in-law, who was then India’s ambassador to Bucharest. Having recently sold his online travel company, he admits he didn’t have a very clear plan for Romania at the time. He came to look around, started buying properties and forests, and what was initially meant to be just a brief venture into a new market evolved, over nearly two decades, into a personal investment portfolio worth approximately €70 million.
Over time, his interests evolved alongside Romania itself. He transitioned from real estate to tourism, then to renewable energy, and is now eyeing the infrastructure of the future: a 50 MW data center, a lithium-ion battery recycling initiative, and an authentic Indian restaurant he plans to open in Bucharest. Today, he reports owning roughly 700 to 800 hectares of land in Giurgiu and Prahova counties, a resort in the Danube Delta, and several properties across different regions of the country. In Sucevița, he holds a 12-hectare plot in a location he considers ideal for a new tourism project.
For Dhamija, however, Romania’s appeal extends far beyond local production or domestic market size; its biggest advantage is its strategic position within the European Union. In his view, a company expanding into Romania shouldn’t view Romania’s consumer market of roughly 20 million people as the ceiling of its operations, but rather as a stepping stone to the wider European market. It is the same philosophy that drove his initial entrepreneurial success: looking beyond a single jurisdiction and leveraging technology to scale across borders and reach a wider audience.
An Investment Born Almost by Chance
“I started investing in Romania right before the country joined the European Union—in 2006, and then continuing through 2007, 2008, and 2009,” Dhamija recalls. Yet, EU accession wasn’t what brought him here. His brother-in-law, the Indian ambassador, invited him for a visit just as Dhamija had exited his company: “He invited me, and I had just sold my business. The rest is history.”
Initially, Dhamija focused primarily on real estate and timberlands. In the years that followed, his investments diversified, and Romania gradually cemented its place as a cornerstone of his portfolio.
From his vantage point, Romania today is a vastly more mature economy with stronger institutions than when he first arrived. At the same time, navigating local project development has left him increasingly critical of administrative sluggishness when dealing with new investments- particularly in fast-moving, technology-driven sectors.
From Travel Tickets to an 11-Nation Enterprise
Dhamija’s entrepreneurial journey began long before Romania, back in the late 1970s. Entering the travel industry, he spotted an early internet opportunity that was still largely unexplored: taking a proven US business model and scaling it across multiple European markets. His online travel agency expanded into 11 countries and eventually went public, listing on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange.
When reflecting on his success, Dhamija shies away from narratives built around a single sensational stroke of genius. Instead, he emphasizes incremental growth and the reality that major enterprises are built over time. “Everyone thinks you get rich overnight. No, it doesn’t happen that way. You grow steadily year after year, and one day you wake up big,” the entrepreneur notes.
A pivotal turning point in his trajectory was treating Europe as a single, unified market. Rather than staying tethered exclusively to Great Britain and its 60 million consumers, he pushed his business into multiple countries, using the internet to connect them under a cohesive commercial strategy. This multiplied his addressable market severalfold compared with the UK market alone, giving him a distinct advantage at a time when online competition was still sparse.
That foundational experience shapes his perspective on Romania today. For Dhamija, the value of an investment doesn’t end at national borders; what matters is how effectively that base can be used to reach other markets.
Green Energy Followed Politics
His pivot toward renewables came later, following a stint in politics. Dhamija was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Democrats in 2019—at the height of the Brexit debate—where he campaigned fiercely for the UK to remain in the European Union. During his mandate, he dove deep into green energy policies and EU-India trade relations. Returning to his landholdings in Romania with these insights, he began to see a new use for his properties: clean energy generation.
A significant portion of his land sits in Giurgiu and Prahova counties, totaling between 700 and 800 hectares. He believes southern Romania offers exceptional conditions for solar power and battery storage installations, pointing out that greater energy production can help drive economic growth. Yet, practical experience with his own ventures has made him increasingly aware of a complaint echoed by many investors in Romania: the long wait to move a project from conception to construction.
For one of his solar projects, he notes it took four and a half years just to reach that stage. For an entrepreneur accustomed to operating in fast-moving industries where windows of opportunity can shift overnight, that timeline is unacceptably slow. “Time is money,” Dhamija stresses.
This frustration underpins his core recommendation for the Romanian public administration: implementing a “single-window” system to streamline how investors interact with regulatory bodies on new developments. In his view, this isn’t about cutting corners or scrapping rules, but about eliminating bureaucratic delays between project phases and fostering an administration agile enough to keep pace with the modern industries it seeks to attract.
This bottleneck becomes even more critical as Romania aims to break into fast-moving technology sectors. Data centers, artificial intelligence, clean energy, and battery recycling are fields where stalled approvals can sink a project entirely. Romania has the fundamentals needed to compete globally in these sectors, provided it can match the pace of the free market.
A 50 MW Data Center and a Battery Recycling Venture
Dhamija’s upcoming pipeline illustrates just how much his Romanian investment thesis has matured. While his early bets centered on land, real estate, and hospitality, his focus is now shifting toward digital infrastructure and industries set to become increasingly important as electrification expands.
One standout project is a 50 MW data center. Dhamija argues that Romania can capitalize on the mounting strain facing digital infrastructure in Western Europe and the United States, where land and power allocations for data centers have grown scarce and prohibitively expensive. Romania’s competitive edge lies in the availability of land, reliable access to energy, and deep integration within the EU market.
Simultaneously, he is advancing a lithium-ion battery recycling venture alongside Lohan, an Indian company he describes as a unicorn startup. This initiative targets more than just waste processing; it’s about reclaiming critical raw materials and returning them to the supply chain. Dhamija highlights Europe’s over-reliance on supply chains dominated by China, arguing that the continent must build domestic recycling capacity to reduce this strategic vulnerability.
Yet the same regulatory hurdle crops up here as it does in energy: public authorities must understand emerging technologies quickly enough to regulate them effectively. Dhamija notes that civil servants require specialized training in areas such as data centers and battery recycling to ensure the permitting process doesn’t lag behind technological progress.
From an investor’s standpoint, Romania has most of the fundamentals in place: land, resources, and full access to the EU market. The real question is how quickly those advantages can be turned into projects ready for construction. Pointing to Poland as a benchmark for rapid execution, Dhamija believes Romania can catch up if it reduces the friction and delays between an investment pledge and the start of construction.
Romania: A Springboard for Indian Enterprises
When discussing Romania, Dhamija repeatedly returns to the broader European market. In his estimation, an Indian enterprise entering the country shouldn’t treat Romania as a standalone destination, but rather as an operational launching pad for the rest of the European Union. “That’s how I would approach it if I were launching a business here. I’d set up camp with an eye toward continental expansion,” he says.
This mirrors the playbook he used to build his travel empire. Instead of getting bogged down in a single domestic market, he harnessed technology to expand across multiple European markets, scaling a business far beyond what the British market alone could have sustained.
To his mind, this scale disadvantage is the core structural handicap European economies face compared to the United States. American firms enjoy a massive, homogenous domestic market from day one, while European companies must navigate a patchwork of national jurisdictions, languages, and regulations. The EU Single Market can rewrite that equation, and Romania can serve as an ideal beachhead for Indian firms looking to enter Europe.
This thesis echoes through his book, The Indian Century, where he examines India’s economic ascendancy and its rising global footprint. At the same time, he maintains that Europe must foster tighter internal collaboration to remain a major economic superpower capable of holding its own in a tripolar world dominated by the United States, China, and increasingly, India.
Philanthropy, the Danube Delta, and an Indian Eatery in Bucharest
Investments tell only part of Dhamija’s story. In India, through the Shiksha and Chikitsa foundations, he has spent nearly two decades championing education and healthcare initiatives. Shiksha supports the schooling of roughly 1,200 street children, while Chikitsa distributes free medicine to around 120,000 people annually across 15 medical clinics. “A country can only thrive when all its people are educated and healthy,” he says. For Dhamija, philanthropy is a core duty—a way for a successful entrepreneur to give back once they have amassed the resources to make a difference.
Back in Romania, his next venture breaks away entirely from energy and tech. Dhamija is gearing up to launch an authentic Indian restaurant in Bucharest, slated to open in the autumn. He wants to showcase what genuine, top-tier Indian gastronomy looks like to the local Romanian palate.
Looking back across two decades of planning, land-buying, and investing, he speaks fondly of the places in Romania he has grown attached to: the Danube Delta, home to his resort, and Sucevița, where his plans for a future tourism development remain alive.
Viewed from afar, Dhamija’s footprint in Romania might look like a random assortment of unrelated bets: land, forestry, tourism, energy, data centers, recycling, and soon, fine dining. Yet beneath the surface lies a coherent thread the entrepreneur repeatedly underscores: Romania makes sense when viewed as a gateway to a larger market, provided projects can be executed quickly. Having invested roughly €70 million of his own capital in the country over nearly two decades, he has continued backing it through thick and thin. Today, the stakes stretch far beyond real estate; they center on energy, digital infrastructure, and circular-economy recycling—sectors where Romania is striving to attract capital and build long-term industrial capacity.
And when asked what must change for Romania to attract more investments of this caliber, Dhamija circles right back to the maxim that underpins his critique: “Time is money.”