The journalists of RISE Moldova, together with their Lithuanian and Belarusian colleagues, discovered an international group that implemented a scheme to falsify Moldovan certificates for exporting fruit to Belarus and Russia in seven states, IPN reports.

In the journalistic investigation “Fruit from the EU exported to Russia with Moldovan passport”, the reporters showed how functionaries and businessmen from Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Belarus and Russia used about 1,000 certificates to ‘Moldovenize’ about 20,000 tonnes of fruit grown in other states.

“Since December 2015 until January 2016, employees of the National Food Safety Agency issued at least 1,000 phytosanitary certificates for Moldovan fruit. In fact, based on these certificates, no apples from Moldova reached the shops in Minsk or Moscow,” said the journalists of RISE Moldova.

According to them, the certificates were mailed to Lithuania from where, accompanied by Moldovan documents, the fruit from Spain, Greece, the Netherlands and Poland were exported to Belarus and Russia. Making documents for seven exporting companies from Transnistria, the group managed to avoid the Kremlin’s bam imposed in August 2014 on the import of most of the agricultural products from the European Union. Among the given Transnistrian companies are two inexistent firms.

A RISE correspondent, posing as an employee of the company Moldstat-capturat (which does not exist and was invented for the investigation), contacted several intermediary businessmen from Lithuania. “We convinced the Lithuanian exporters that we can obtain in Chisinau and sell to them certificates showing that the products are of Moldovan origin for €800 apiece. We even managed to obtain fictitious invoices for the purchase of two trucks of fruit from these companies,” said the authors of the investigation.

Aliona Mandatii, producer and exporter of agricultural products from Moldova, said that owing to the export of foreign products based on Moldovan documents of origin, the national producers were affected.

“The losses caused by the given scheme are large. The purchase price of Moldovan apples fell by 30-40%. For example, the sorts Idared and Golden, which can be found in abundance in northern Moldova, are purchased for 7 lei a kilogram instead of 10 lei. The price of the sort Gala decreased from 10 lei to 8 lei,” stated Mandatii.

She also said that there are about 40,000 tonnes of apples now in the country, but it is hard to sell them abroad because Polish products continue to be exported based on Moldovan certificates.