The Parliament’s commission on national security, defense and public order was furnished with information about the serous abuses committed at the Mărculești International Airport. The commission’s chairman Kiril Moțpan said the abuses refer to illegal transactions with armament, artificial creation of debts, rigged tender contest and misappropriations of tens of millions of lei. The information is to be checked by a parliamentary commission of inquiry, IPN reports.
Kiril Moțpan told a news conference that the Mărculești Airport since 2008 has been a free economic zone whose residents enjoy exemptions from VAT, excises and customs duties and other tax concessions. Until August 2017, the airport was managed by the Ministry of Defense and was then transferred to the Ministry of Economy without comprehensive inventorying. “We don’t know if the receipt documents were transmitted to the Government. In July 2018, the airport was transferred under the management of the Public Property Agency, again without receipt documents. The state institutions didn’t react somehow,” stated the MP.
According to him, starting with 2013 the airport’s administration had asked for €2 million in state budget funds for repairing and maintaining the six airplanes owned by the airport. The last repair works performed in 2017 cost the budget €800,000. “The furnished information shows the airport’s administration transferred about 50% of the money received from the state to an offshore company. This was managed by the former director of the airport Sergiu Ciobanu,” stated Kiril Moțpan.
“The schemes to embezzle assets of the airport consisted in the sale of plane spare parts and equipment at very low prices to affiliated firms or making of very costly purchases from the offshore company that was managed by the same Ciobanu. In 2012-2017, as a result of phantom, formal and unsubstantiated debts to firms managed from the shadow, including from the Russian Federation, the state was caused damage of tens of millions of lei.”
The MP also said that the Mărculești Airport now has no functional aircraft. In 2018, a consignment of unsupervised armament and munitions was found in one of the airport’s storehouses. “This airport was controlled by swindlers and the competent bodies, even if they started a number of criminal cases, completed none of these,” said Kiril Moțpan.
A parliamentary commission of inquiry is to be set up to investigate this case. In parallel, the Ministry of Finance will be requested to assess the financial inspection performed at the institution.
