Ex-vice mayor Anatol Turcanu appointed as vice director of the Construction and Territory Development Agency

Ex-vice mayor of the capital, Anatol Turcanu was appointed to the function of deputy director of the Construction and Territory Development Agency. Turcanu’s appointment was announced Thursday, February 21 during the Government session, Info-Prim Neo reports. Anatol Turcanu, 57, is licenced in engineering and construction, and served for approximately ten years as vice mayor of the capital, in charge of constructions, transportation and means of communication. After the local elections of 2003, several civil servants from the team of ex Mayor Serafim Urecheanu were arrested, accused of corruption. Turcanu, who was accused of embezzling 1.9 million MDL from “Apa-Canal”, managed to leave the country before the arrest. He was registered for international search, and his photos were published in all Chisinau’s newspapers. One year ago, on February 10, 2006 Turcanu was apprehended in Constanta, in his daughter’s apartment, were he stayed all these years, being preventively arrested for 29 days by Constanta’s magistrates, and later handed to Moldovan authorities. Shortly after his extradition, Anatol Turcanu was found innocent, and the three cases in which the functionary from Serafim’s Urecheanu team was accused were closed in July 2006. The media assumed then that the investigations stopped after Turcanu’s meeting with President Vladimir Voronin Turcanu confirmed that he had meetings with the head of state “and before, and after the case closing”, but at these meetings they discussed municipality issues, and not the respective cases. Ex-vice mayor said he was not asked to do anything in exchange for the closure of his penal case. Both the Prosecutor’s Office (PO) and the Centre for Combating Corruption and Economic Crime (CCCEC) did not present any explications on the closing of the case that suspected him of corruption for three years. Anatol Turcanu is on the BMD parliamentary election lists of March 2005. Previously, following the local elections of 2003, he obtained a municipal councillor’s mandate on AMN lists, but later he declined his councillorship.