Some of the elements of the banking fraud wouldn’t have been possible without the adoption of a number of legislative changes and the blocking by courts of law and the Constitutional Court of legal provisions that protected the banking system from large-scale frauds, says a journalistic investigation presented in the program “Black Box” on TV8 channel, IPN reports.

The authors of the investigation refer to the annulment by the Constitutional Court of legal provisions concerning the National Anticorruption Center’s power to suspend suspicious transactions and of the obligation for banking institutions to report all the transactions that exceed 500,000 lei. This way the so-called ‘red button’ of the Service for the Prevention and Combating of Money Laundering was deactivated.

Financial-banking expert Sergiu Tofilat said these changes diminished the National Anticorruption Center’s powers to prevent and fight money laundering. “I don’t know why the then NAC chief Mister Chetraru didn’t raise the issue and didn’t warn that their instruments were being reduced and they would be unable to prevent and fight money laundering,” stated Sergiu Tofilat.

The investigation also says that later the Constitutional Court suspended National Bank regulations providing that a bank in Moldova can provide at most 100-150 million lei to one beneficiary. “By this decision taken by the Constitutional Court, they managed to deactivate the so-called ‘red button ’of the National Bank of Moldova. They practically reduced to zero the amendments made earlier to the legislation,” said ex-minister of finance Veaceslav Negruță, referring to the changes made at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund, which were aimed at limiting the brutal intervention by courts of law in the management of processes related to the transfer of money, especially that of a dubious origin.