“The bank fraud was a very well orchestrated operation. Some already known and widely circulated information found confirmation in the Kroll 2 Report. It’s clear for everybody who did the job and who reaped the benefits,” political pundit Ion Tăbârță commented for IPN.
Tăbârță says the release of the second report from the financial investigations firm shed more light on how the embezzlement took place. According to him, it was already known that the controversial businessman and politician Ilan Shor, now apparently a fugitive from justice, had been the frontman of the operations. The second report also points the finger at people in his entourage, some of whom were propelled to Parliament in the meantime. Now the Prosecutor’s Office needs to react and put these people under investigation, says Tăbârță.
Another Tăbârță’s takeaway from the released report is that the state agencies that were supposed to supervise the financial and banking system “just stood by and did nothing”. “It is obvious that those agencies had been deactivated on political order, and held back whenever they attempted to do something”. Furthermore, “after 2015, the state authorities did almost nothing to bring those involved, and those indicated in the report to justice, despite having all this information.”
“How come Ilan Shor and his people were left to engage in political activity unhindered and how on earth they became mayors and MPs if it was known that Shor had been the frontman? We all saw how the criminal case of the controversial politician has been purposefully dragged through court for so long. The previous government was fine with this, as long as they had (Shor) under their influence and could use him for various political maneuvers and public rallies. At one point the Shor Party seemed to be a strike force with an order to harass the opposition,” said Ion Tăbârță
As for the list of final beneficiaries, Tăbârță finds it puzzling that the Prosecutor General Eduard Harunjen recently said that no such list exists, while some time ago the ex-prime minister said 90% of the people indicated in the report as beneficiaries are honest people. “I think the parliamentary inquiry commission should dig more in this direction. The list must be retrieved, so that everybody can learn about the beneficiaries of the non-performing loans.”
A facsimile of the Second Kroll Report was released yesterday, sans the beneficiaries’ list, by the parliamentary commission investigating the bank fraud. The reasons put forward by prosecutors for not releasing the list have ranged from that it would harm the recovery efforts, to confidentiality clauses imposed by Kroll, to that the list doesn’t exist at all.
