President Maia Sandu’s bill concerning the extended confiscation of ill-gotten gains is in parliamentary procedure and will be proposed for public debates. The head of the Parliament’s legal committee for appointments and immunities Olesea Stamate said the document comes to improve the current legislation and to allow for the confiscation of property that cannot be justified. For his part, Vladislav Gribincea, president of the Legal Resources Center, said the hurry is inopportune in the case of this initiative as any shortcoming in the legislation can hamper the process of confiscating ill-gotten gains, IPN reports.
Olesea Stamate said President Sandu’s legislative proposal is designed to facilitate the implementation of the current legislation that contains the notion of confiscation, but this cannot be implemented.
“We will hold at least one public debate to discuss this bill. The Penal Procedure Code already stipulates extended confiscation, but there are problems related to its implementation. Now any property that substantially exceeds the value of 20 average official salaries, if the illegal character of this property cannot be proven, will be considered illegal. Respectively, the prosecutor will not need to prove that this was gained as a result of an offense,” Olesea Stamate stated in the talk show “Emphasis on Today” on TVR Moldova channel.
Representatives of civil society said the hasty adoption of this bill is contraindicated as this will compromise the authorities’ intention to confiscate ill-gotten gains. The persons accused of obtaining property illegally can profit from the imperfection of the law to protect their assets.
“We have had such a provision since 2014, but it was never applied. I saw Maia Sandu’s bill. To my mind, if it is adopted in the current variant, problems in the implementation process will continue to be faced. We should not hurry with this bill. The confiscation is applied in the end, when the judgment is passed. We do not have many cases in which prosecutors ask for extended confiscation. They should better work on this bill for one more month so that it is implemented appropriately. I assure you that this bill will refer to high-ranking officials, judges and prosecutors, who can hire very good lawyers who will be able to find flaws in the law. That’s why the law should be close to perfection,” said the president of the Legal Resources Center Vladislav Gribincea.
President Maia Sandu submitted to Parliament a bill that enables to implement the extended confiscation of property accumulated by acts of corruption, including when the culprit dies or is tried in absentia. She argued the current law contains obstacles that hamper the procedure for confiscating the property of those who enriched themselves illegally and enables them to keep their assets by transferring them to third persons.
