The vetting commission in the process of assessing candidates will ask for information about them from the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) and the National Anticorruption Center (NAC). The PGO will also conduct an audit to see how the Register of Crime Information is completed. Such recommendations were formulated by the Parliament’s commission for appointments and immunities, IPN reports.
The parliamentary commission staged public hearings on a criminal case concerning acts of corruption, which featured member of the Superior Council of Magistracy (SCM) Iulian Muntean, who was confirmed by Parliament to this post after he passed the assessment of the pre-vetting commission.
“I want to note that during the assessment of this candidate, the commission hadn’t been informed about particular investigations or procedures featuring Mister Muntean. We didn’t receive such information. As in other cases, the commission used a lot of different sources of information to assess the candidates so that the assessment was correct,” said the commission’s chairman Herman von Hebel, noting that Mister Muntean presented the ethics questionnaire that is filled out voluntarily to the commission and he didn’t make reference to any investigations in this.
NAC director Iulian Rusu said they examined the central database and their Center’s database and didn’t find any data about Iulian Muntean’s involvement in a criminal case. The NAC initiated an internal inquiry to establish the actions taken by the employees. It was preliminarily established that some of the NAC employees acted with ill intent.
The legal commission for appointments and immunities requested the PGO, the NAC and the Anticorruption Prosecutors Office to present a report on the cases that are several years old.
Iulian Muntean was named SCM member from among non-judges by Parliament on September 7. On September 20, it became known that SCM member Iulian Muntean is investigated for passive corruption. He doesn’t deny the fact that he was accused in a criminal case started in 2018. Apparently, he didn’t inform the pre-vetting commission of this and didn’t present evidence showing that he attempted to find out at what stage the case is now.
Following those reports, Iulian Muntean said the so-called criminal case was fabricated by order of the regime of Plahotniuc as an intimidation method. This case wasn’t indicated in any of the databases managed by the state institutions or the pre-vetting commission would have learned about it.
