The Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) suggests constituting a working group that would work out a new strategy for recovering the money stolen from the banking system. According to the institution, the strategy of 2018 was designed during the period of ‘state capture’, in unknown circumstances and by unknown persons, IPN reports.
“They say that this strategic document was thought up in June 2018 by the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office and the Criminal Assets Recovery Agency and this was later made public by ex-prosecutor general Eduard Harunjen and ex-deputy prosecutor of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office Adriana Bețișor, but it had never been registered in the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the National Anticorruption Center or the Criminal Assets Recovery Agency. It wasn’t approved by a joint order and no traces of work with this document were identified, the operational information in this case showing that it was worked out outside the Prosecutor’s Office and the other two indicated institutions and not by those who put their signatures and assumed the document,” PGO said in a press release.
The institution considers that to optimize the process of recovering the stolen funds, the state needs a vision and a complex strategic document, but the designing and implementation of such a strategy is beyond the powers of the Prosecutor’s Office and the intervention of the Government and Parliament are needed.
“The placing of responsibility onto the Prosecutor’s Office for the whole process of recovering the stolen funds, which should first of all ensure the efficiency of the investigation in this case and whose official duties are too narrow for covering the whole spectrum of activities required in this direction, actually determined results that are beyond the society’s expectations and a conflict situation between the authorities of the first level and the risk of appearing discredited before the foreign development partners,” runs the press release.
The PGO will designate by a representative from it and from the specialized Prosecutor’s Offices involved in the investigation of the bank fraud and will soon present the institution’s view on the penal and civil components of the document.
