Adrian Sârbu

Sârbu was born on 18 April 1955 in Brașov. He studied film directing at the Institute of Theatre and Film Arts (IATC) in Bucharest. In 1980 he worked as assistant director to Andrei Blaier on the television series Lumini și umbre, according to the cinematographer Alexandru Doru Spătaru, who was an assistant cameraman on the same production.

He was then hired by the Alexandru Sahia studio, the state documentary studio in Bucharest, as part of a group of young directors who joined it at the start of the 1980s. Adevărul has written that he made more than 150 documentaries there. The best known of them is Aflați despre mine că sunt bine, sănătos, ceea ce vă doresc la fel... (1982), a 17-minute colour film written by Mircea Bunescu and initially titled Căminiștii. Shot in workers' hostels, it follows young people brought from the countryside to work in Bucharest industry and the loss of bearings that came with the move. The film was included on the first Sahia Vintage DVD published by the One World Romania association, and the critic Andrei Gorzo described it as remarkably consistent in the melancholy with which it looks at these lives, with heavily staged camera movements by Sârbu and his cinematographer Mircea Bunescu. It has since been shown in archive programmes on housing in socialist Bucharest, and in 2026 it was screened at the One World Romania festival, under the English title I For One Am Alive and Well..., alongside a short by Jiří Menzel. Forbes România noted in 2017 that this period is one that former media figures who worked in the state audiovisual sector tend to leave out of their biographies.

Rise to chief executive

While he was selling, he was also moving up inside CME. On 23 February 2006 the company put him in charge of a new operating group covering Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, describing him as a key top manager who had run its Romanian stations for a decade and made them the model for its other television companies. He became chief operating officer in October 2007 and president at the start of 2009, and on 27 July 2009, the day the Media Pro Entertainment agreement was signed, the board appointed him president and chief executive officer, succeeding Michael Garin. Lauder called him the most talented executive he had worked with, and Romanian media described the appointment as the highest executive post ever held by a Romanian in an American multinational. His contract ran to the end of 2013 with a salary of $1.8 million a year plus bonuses tied to EBITDA targets, and he moved to Prague, where CME's operating headquarters were. He joined the board on 8 December 2009. Once the entertainment deal closed he held about 5 percent of CME's shares, making him one of its largest individual shareholders. He sold parcels of the stock at regular intervals from 2010, and by early 2013 his holding had fallen to about 3.2 percent. CME also bought programming and services from companies connected to him, purchases it disclosed as related-party transactions of about $51.8 million in 2008 and $33.1 million in 2009.

Sârbu has been married twice and has three daughters.

On 22 December 1989 Sârbu was inside the building of the Communist Party Central Committee, where he filmed the meetings that produced the new leadership. According to Adevărul, participants in the revolution described him as close to Silviu Brucan, who brought him into the building, and he made his first money selling the footage to foreign television networks. In 2014 he released a previously unseen recording of the constitution of the Council of the National Salvation Front on 22 December 1989.

After the revolution he became a member of the National Salvation Front Council, the provisional governing body, as secretary of state for the press. In Petre Roman's government he held the same rank and was responsible for the executive's communication and image. Prosecutors in the Mineriad case later described him as the prime minister's chief of staff and adviser. World Screen wrote that in this role he promoted the country's first audiovisual law, which opened the way to privately owned television. He left politics after the events of 13 to 15 June 1990 in Bucharest, known as the Mineriad, although Adevărul noted that he remained close to people in power.