Former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, who was arrested in October 2015 and sentenced to nine years in jail, said that while in detention he had a meeting and several telephone conversations with the former leader of the Democratic Party Vlad Plahotniuc, whom he accuses of his arrest, IPN reports.
In the second part of an interview broadcast by TV8 channel on July 15, Vlad Filat said the meeting with Vlad Plahotniuc was held not in Penitentiary No. 13, where he is held, but at the National Anticorruption Center, on December 19, 2015. That evening, he was told he will be transferred from the penitentiary to the remand prison of the NAC (where the detention conditions are better – e.n.) and he gathered all his belongings.
He noted he was permanently humiliated. He was escorted to an office on the fourth floor where Plahotniuc came shortly afterward, accompanied by his ‘servant’ Costea Botnari, who examined the office to see if everything was all right and then left. The discussion was neither short nor long. “I asked him why he did what he done – that charge concerning the alleged bribery of €250 million – and why he presented a media show as a reason for removing me? The answer was plain – “If I hadn’t done this, you would have done it”. I asked him how could I have done it if he controlled the Prosecutor’s Office, the NAC and other institutions”. Vlad Filat specified Vlad Plahotniuc accused him of not behaving correctly in relation to him and of supporting his then political opponents, but he denied this.
He said that after that meeting, he didn’t see the former leader of the PDM, but periodically had telephone discussions with him on the initiative of Plahotniuc, through the agency of a person from the administration of the Department of Penitentiary Institutions. The first telephone conversation was held when Plahotniuc announced his intention to become Prime Minister and he then asked him to persuade his colleagues from the Liberal Democratic Party to accept to communicate with the Liberal Party or the Lib-Dems will move to the opposition. More discussions followed later.
Vlad Filat also said that he wrote a letter to the then President Nicolae Timofti. “I considered and still consider that Plahotniuc should have become Prime Minister then (2016) as, if he had taken up that post, his epoch in the modern history of the Republic of Moldova would have ended much faster,” he noted.
The interview was conducted in Penitentiary No. 13 where the former Prime Minister is serving his nine-year sentence for passive corruption and influence peddling. He is also investigated in another case for considerable money laundering. Vlad Filat pleads not guilty, saying his case is political in character.
