Moldovan prosecutor general informs about more irregularities, infringements in work of two specialized prosecutor's offices

Chisinau, 20 January /MOLDPRES/ - Moldova’s Prosecutor General Alexandr Stoianoglo today presented a report following controls carried out at the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office (PA) and the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Causes (PCCOCS). The document pointed to more serious irregularities and infringements in the work of these two specialized prosecutor’s offices.     

„The controls carried out at PA and PCCOCS revealed the unseen face of the activity of the two subdivisions of the Prosecutor General’s Office (PG). We did not check everything; is it is impossible to do this in one month; we intervened selectively, taking into account certain priority criteria, having at the basis the seriousness of the infringements concerning the human rights. What we have managed to control showed pretty serious infringements,” Stoianoglo said.    

The lack of the record of the basic work of the prosecutors, falsehoods, corruption acts, failure to turn to account the potential of the two specialized prosecutor’s offices, ignoring the files with high impact, unlawful acts – these are just some of the infringements pointed out by the prosecutor general. “The conclusion we draw is that the potential of the specialized prosecutor’s office is used for documenting minor cases, just in order to create friendly statistics indexes, contrary to the expectations of the society, development partners and, in this context, we generate an artificial diminution of the potential these autonomous prosecutor’s offices have and as a result, there is big corruption, the files with high impact remain unmanaged or are covered with dust in safes, having no finalities during years,” Alexandr Stoianoglo said.       

„Through the activities of these two specialized prosecutor’s offices, which regarded glaring infringements of the fundamental human rights, Moldova was treated by a good deal of the society, on a period of more years, as a police state, where people lived with the feeling of fear for the law-enforcement bodies, assessed as inquisitor-like and, in this context, the basic goal currently faced by the Prosecutor’s Office is to re-establish the people’s feeling of safety and confidence in justice,” Alexandr Stoianoglo stressed.       

In another context, the prosecutor general referred also to subjects of special interest, such as the bank fraud and the cause on the financing of the Party of Socialists (PSRM). ”In general, the “bank fraud” subject is pretty complex and, for this reason, the assessments due to be given to the work of the prosecutors involved in carrying out the investigation will be made after the carrying out of a string of procedural activities planned at the last sessions of the criminal prosecution group, under the leadership of the Prosecutor General,” Stoianoglo emphasized.    

„Touching upon the cause on “PSRM’s financing,” opened, in fact, for alleged actions of money laundering, which is also extremely voluminous and complex, it is worth mentioning that the procedural activities have had, starting from 2016, a non-planned and inconsistent character during a three-year period (a criminal file in 2016, another in 2017 and no criminal prosecution actions in 2018 and 2019), and aroused interest only when certain social and political events started being used by different interest groups, including by some prosecutors, who were eventually responsible for the inefficiency of the investigation till present,” the prosecutor general noted.    

As a result of the statements made at the news conference, Prosecutor General Alexandr Stoianoglo publicly apologized, ”on behalf of the institution I represent, to the hundreds of citizens who were illegally prosecuted by prosecutors.” ”I assure you that the new leadership of the Prosecutor’s Office will reset the prosecution bodies’ system and will re-bring it to normal, in the spirit of respect for the fundamental human rights and freedoms,” Stoianoglo added.   

The controls instructed by Prosecutor’s General Alexandr Stoianoglo were carried out on the period 9 December 2019 – 10 January 2020 and concerned all dimensions of competence of the two specialized prosecutor’s offices for the last four years. The verifications were made by two groups of prosecutors, according to concrete indicators, and the concerned actions did not hinder the good carrying out of the criminal prosecution on the files managed by these specialized subdivisions.