3567 Views DW has conducted an interview with Iulian Rusu, the director of the National Anticorruption Center (NAC), with whom he discussed corruption in Moldova, why high-level corruption cases are taking place, and how this phenomenon can be eradicated.
DW: According to the NAC report for the first semester of 2022, 291 corruption offenses were detected. Is this figure an indicator that in our country corruption continues to be a difficult problem to solve?
Iulian Rusu: The figures are not very different from those of the past years and indicate that we continue to investigate corruption cases, which come both through various complaints from citizens, but also through our investigative activity. The fact that these causes are still instrumentalized means that the phenomenon of corruption exists and in order to reduce this phenomenon, coordinated actions are needed in several directions.
Corruption also happens because we have difficult living conditions, because often corruption is not punished, but also because we have not been able to reach finality on the resonance files. Obviously, we are making every effort to make this happen, but we are in a situation where we have to prove the crimes with indisputable evidence. More than that, unlike journalistic investigations, which can be done in a relatively short period of time, we act in the legal realm, of criminal procedure, in which evidence must be administered and guilt must be demonstrated, and this requires much more complex analyses.
I don't think that the numbers are an indicator that would talk about the phenomenon in general. So, what we succeed in, we detect, either from complaints or from our investigative activity. Our assumptions are that the number of corruption crimes, which are committed on the territory of our country, is much higher. It's just that it's a long way until these data reach us. Either people do not trust that the case will be completed, or because it is complicated to prove that the act of corruption took place. For example, active and passive corruption must be demonstrated by direct evidence - audio or video recordings that money has been transferred, and if such information does not exist then we investigate the links that exist between different public officials with subjects, for example, who participate to public procurement. A challenge for us is also the data that we have to obtain from outside the country, to demonstrate the entire chain of actions, which were undertaken in a certain case of corruption.
DW: How many of these 291 corruption cases have reached the finality?
I.R.: At this moment, we can talk about intermediate results on the files that were started at the end of last year, the beginning of this year. We already have several important files that have been submitted to the court. But this is not the finality expected by the whole society. We are interested in having definitive convictions and confiscation of assets. However, there is a judicial stage, in which the judges examine the files that were instrumented with the prosecutors and are going to present their opinion on the relevance of the evidence, on how strong the evidence is to prove the person's guilt. We are talking, first of all, about high-ranking officials, including from the justice sector. It is an imposing thing, which is being carried out at the present time to complete the instrumentation and submit to the court files on important subjects, who held high positions in the state in the past, accused of quite serious crimes, related to acts of corruption, of illegal financing, abuse of office.
DW: Citizens, as well as development partners, expect the NAC to investigate major corruption cases, convict key figures in fraud and high-profile crimes. I have seen that in the last year, several arrests have been made, such as that of Igor Dodon, of Marina Tauber, but which have not yet ended in any conviction. Why are lawsuits so difficult? Or is there not enough evidence?
I.R.: I have to make an important clarification related to the security measures in the form of preventive arrest or house arrest. So, these measures are taken by the prosecutors to exclude the risks of destruction of evidence. For now, the security measures have been applied, but there is a long way related to the instrumenting of the file and, depending on the complexity, it may take more time. We also investigate facts that happened in the past, and the long term is related to the complex analysis we carry out and we are dependent on the answers we have to receive on our requests for international legal assistance. This makes it difficult to send the file to court. Often the answers from outside the country are an essential element in the conclusion of the investigations and the submission of the case to the court.
I also want to highlight some practices in the region, such as that of the DNA from Romania, which needed 5-7 years to obtain the first convictions against persons with high positions in the state. So, it is very important to manage our expectations. We do not want to drag out the investigations indefinitely. It is a race against time, and in many ways the resources we have at our disposal are also important, or in our case they are quite limited compared to a fairly large number of criminal cases. For this reason, we focus on the most important causes, in order to ensure their finality.
DW: What's going on with the case of "theft of the billion". Eight years have already passed and there is no progress. When will we see the corrupt bigwigs brought home and the assets recovered?
I.R.: What we have managed to do is to apply seizures. To ensure a definitive recovery we need the same final judgments of the courts, which issue courts of law and, then, the confiscation can be applied. The bank fraud file itself involves a lot of assets, which left the Republic of Moldova and were transferred to many jurisdictions. We have focused our work on cooperating jurisdictions that provide information. Here the path is not very short, because at the beginning we have to prove that the assets we want to seize are suspected to be of illegal origin and from resources obtained from bank fraud, after which we must apply, through the court, seizure and subsequently to request from the foreign authorities the recognition of our conclusion and, therefore, the seizure to be applied in those states as well. In some circumstances, the analysis is quite difficult because it involves the initial identification of those assets, and that involves exchanging information with outside jurisdictions. The cooperation is going quite well. We have intermediate results, and an intermediate result that we will come out with publicly will be the enforcement of the seizure and the enforcement of our recovery actions from the assets confiscated from the bank fraud.
In the case of individuals, the same requests for international legal assistance, including extradition, were submitted. They are under review both in Israel and in the UK or Turkey, jurisdictions with which we are communicating to obtain additional information or, if an arrest warrant has already been issued, to request the extradition of these individuals. An important element is the changes that have been made to the Code of Criminal Procedure, which allow the trial in the absence of the person, when it is proven that sanctions have been taken, to inform the given person that he is summoned on a criminal case. So, our fellow prosecutors are communicating intensively to determine whether such requests for international legal assistance have been granted, and when it is not possible to bring charges, then the cases of these individuals will be examined in their absence. Here we are talking about emblematic subjects, participants in various episodes of bank fraud or other high-profile cases, which are widely known to the general public.
DW: What goals do you have for the future? Can the Republic of Moldova reduce the phenomenon of corruption to a minimum?
I.R.: The reduction is possible gradually. At the moment when the standard of living increases, but also excludes various opportunities to commit acts of corruption. We are very attentive to public procurement, which took place in the past, but also those of this moment. We have adjusted our investigative tactics. We understand that our priorities relate to areas where large assets are managed, such as the funds of the National Social Insurance Fund or the National Medical Insurance Company, but also funds in the field of infrastructure or road construction loans. These are priority areas for us, because the monetary value is also very high.
We have a number of strategic documents that we are working on. It is a national recovery program for the next four years. A project that is in the final stages of consultation and coordination, which we will soon submit to Parliament for consideration and approval. We examine how the National Integrity and Anti-Corruption Strategy has been implemented. Accordingly, for next year we plan to develop a new document. We are also making an effort to internally streamline the activity of the NAC through digitization tools, such as the implementation of an automated information system - the Register of Criminal Assets. This will allow us to better account for our actions on the seizures we make and ultimately have a clearer picture of how our criminal prosecution and asset recovery actions are progressing.