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54 I Southeast Europe bne October 2021
Romania’s anti-corruption struggle still inspiring its neighbours
Clare Nuttall in Glasgow
Since coming to power in the July 2021 general election, Moldova’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) has sought to make far-reaching anti-corruption reforms. To achieve this, the new guard in Chisinau are looking for inspiration from neighbouring Romania, where the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) embarked on a bold effort to bring top officials to justice under its former head, Laura Codruta Kovesi.
Even though Kovesi was removed from the helm of the DNA in 2018, with relatively few true success stories in the fight against corruption in emerging Europe the years during which the Romanian agency brought numerous current and former officials to book remain one of the few shining lights of the anti-corruption struggle in the region.
The month after she was elected in December 2020, Moldovan President
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Maia Sandu flew to Brussels for meetings with officials including Kovesi, now the first chief prosecutor of the European Prosecutor's Office. Back in January, there was little Sandu could
do to pursue her reform agenda, as the parliament remained dominated by former president Igor Dodon’s Socialists and other opponents of the PAS. As she noted at the time: “The EU wants to help us, to support the development of the Republic of Moldova, but it needs reliable partners here.”
That all changed in July, when the general election resulted in a landslide victory for the PAS, finally allowing Sandu and her colleagues to embark on the wide-ranging overhaul of judicial institutions, which had been captured to a large degree under Moldova’s former pre-eminent politician Vlad Plahotnuic, then staffed with some new political appointees under Dodon. As reported by bne IntelliNews, the chapter on justice reform in the ruling strategy
document published by Moldova’s new Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita clearly incorporates the experience Romania gained in the fight against corruption.
In the two months since the election, legislation putting in place new procedures for the evaluation of the head prosecutors has already been promulgated with the aim of a quick replacement of general prosecutor Alexandr Stoianoglo, a Dodon-era appointee. A key step in the overhaul of the judiciary is replacing Stoianoglo and other top prosecutors. Both the General Prosecutor's Office and the National Anticorruption Centre (NAC) have been strongly criticised by MPs for their lack of progress on recovering the money stolen in the so-called $1bn bank frauds.
Under previous regimes, corruption, both petty and on a grand scale, had been able to flourish in Moldova. The $1bn bank frauds involved the siphoning off of funds amounting to around 12%