Lawyer Vladislav Gribincea, who represented the plaintiff Oferta Plus Ltd at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), expressed his concern about Deputy Justice Minister Nicolae Esanu’s statements that the judges must not be held accountable for the mistakes committed when making decisions as a result of which Moldova lost cases at the ECHR, Info-Prim Neo reports. At a news conference on February 14, Gribincea said that the guarantees provided to judges must be guarantees for the mistakes committed from imprudence and not for the intentional abuses. He stressed that the ECHR’s judgment in the case of Oferta Plus clearly stipulates that “the quashing of the court decisions by the Supreme Court of Justice was abusive”. “The abuse does not mean mistake,” Gribincea said. The lawyer says that if it is not about imprudence than it is about intention and the intention is an offence for which the persons must be held accountable, even if they are judges or President of Moldova. Moreover, the ECHR does not often use the word “abuse” and when it uses it this means something. Gribincea says that many persons would have answered for such abuses in a society with a real democracy. In such cases as Oferta Plus, the persons to blame should have been dismissed, punished or even prosecuted. The lawyer says that such inaction on the part of the state is typical of the authoritarian systems where there is no strong parliamentary Opposition. “I think that the Europeans form an opinion about Moldova by the ECHR’s decisions,” Gribincea said, stressing that this also refers to the foreign investors that want to come to Moldova. According to him, the analysis of the investment flow in Moldova shows that the investments are not made by foreign investors, but mainly by businessmen that earned money in Moldova through offshore firms. Gribincea says that the investors that invest in Moldova are important players that know how the business works in such democracies. The lawyer did not rule out that he could be prosecuted for such statements in a country like Moldova, but he said that he assumes the risk. In the case of Oferta Plus, a company that supplied electric power to Moldova during 1997-1998, including to budget-funded institutions that did not fully paid for the consumed electricity, the Government of Moldova was obliged to pay damages totalling 2.53 million euros, sum that is larger than all the damages paid by Moldova to date under ECHR decisions.