Former finance minister Veaceslav Negruta, currently an expert at Transparency International-Moldova, says that the summary of the Kroll reports suggests the Shor Group wasn’t operating alone during the theft of the billion, but played a key role in the scheme. On the other side, current finance minister Octavian Armasu promised the government will seize the assets of those involved in the fraud, IPN reports.
Negruta told Radio Free Europe that the new report confirms the information from the first one and lays out the schemes through which money was stolen and laundered from Moldova. It offers more details and points towards new jurisdictions where the money was sent. As regards the people’s expectations from this report, Negruta thinks they are justified. The people should know their ‘heroes’ and what happened in 2014, because for the next 24-25 years they will pay to cover the holes this coordinated fraud, as the report stresses, created in the banking system.
“This burden will be borne by taxpayers. 2017 is a relevant example, when all the money paid from the state budget to the National Bank was tax money and not funds recovered during the investigation of the fraud”, said Negruta. He argued that each and every citizen has the right to put pressure on the government bodies to recover the 15 billion lei identified in the Kroll report and confirmed by the National Bank. This is the shortest path to recover the money from the group discussed in the report. The funds should be put into the state treasury to get rid of the 13 billion debt that affects everyone today.
In another interview, the current finance minister calls for patience. “We are waiting for some future events that will provide us with the means to recover this debt the government currently has to the National Bank. We had to do it. I won’t judge how the decision was taken in 2013-2014, if the bail was right, if it should have been smaller, there were a lot of debates… When I came into office, the state had already taken upon itself this burden, but it helped preserve the people’s trust in the banks and today the people are still keeping their money in banks”, explained the official.
Octavian Armasu said the state issued government bonds with a maturity of 25 years. He assured that the authorities are doing their best to find they money to repay this debt without putting a strain on the national budget. He says these potential sources are the liquidation of the defrauded banks and seizing the assets of those involved in stealing and laundering the billion, which will help diminish the impact on the state budget.
