Employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Anticorruption Center are carry out searches at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry and examine the documents of the working group for drawing up the regulations concerning the distribution of the agriculture subsidization fund for 2011-2014. The information was confirmed for IPN by Alexandru Tonu, who heads the Agriculture Minister’s staff.
Contacted by IPN, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Nicolae Olaru said that he, as the head of the working group constituted by the minister this summer, discovered a number of irregularities in the provision of subsidies for plantations of black current. The working group was created following complaints about the subsidization process received from farmers.
Nicolae Olaru noted that about 200 ha of plantations were checked and it was established that only two economic entities met all the bush purchasing and planting standards. Irregularities were committed owing to the negligence of those who deal with the certification of saplings and bushes and who examine the plantations for providing subsidies. It was also established that there was set up no cherry sorting line for which the Agency for Intervention and Payments in Agriculture provided subsidies of 4 million lei.
Chairman of the National Association of Agricultural Producers “UniAgroProtect” Alexandru Slusari said that company that was to run the sorting line was inspected by representatives of the Agency for Intervention and Payments in Agriculture and these determined that everything was fine. “As far as I know, the responsible company is making effort to immediately bring another line so as to hide the illegality,” he stated.
Earlier, Slusari said that Marin Mortean who works at this Agency was dismissed from the National Anticorruption Center on suspicions of acts of corruption. In a news conference, Marin Mortean presented his employment record book, saying he didn’t work at the Center.
Contacted by IPN, the Center’s spokeswoman Angela Cibotaru-Starinschi said that Marin Mortean worked at the National Anticorruption Center when the institution was called the Center for Combating Economic Crime and Corruption and was fired in 2008 for discipline violations.
