Vlad Filat: Ipteh’s nationalization is politically motivated

Lib-Dem Party president Vladimir Filat condemns the judgment pronounced on Thursday, August 28, by the Supreme Court of Justice, which ordered the nationalization of “Ipteh” joint stock company, and accuses the ruling party of intervening in this process. Filat, who owns 49.63 percent of the company’s stock, stated at a news conference on Friday that all the legal actions around Ipteh were politically motivated. “This is clearly a political action, which targets me personally and the Liberal Democratic Party in general. Perhaps they bear a grudge about our intention to show the citizens that we need to change the Constitution in order to have a president elected by popular vote and, in general, about all our actions and our ways of doing things”, said Vladimir Filat. According to him, Ipteh’s nationalization actually started when he bought shares in the company in September 2006. Later, when he decided to run for Chisinau mayor, he was allegedly threatened in order to force him out of the race. “I didn’t want to divulge those things then, because I was engaged in the race to the bottom”, explained Filat. According to the Lib-Dem president, he paid a sum of 800,000 euros for his holding in Ipteh JSC, which was privatized in November 1999. After a series of inspections carried out to verify whether the privatization of the company had been legal, the Prosecutor’s Office ordered that the privatization agreement be terminated. “Once we started the campaign themed “Moldova without Voronin, Moldova without Communists”, things started to turn sour”, Filat added. Filat’s lawyer, Alexandru Tanase, stated that Ipteh’s nationalization was done in breach of procedure, ignoring the other shareholders. “It is an arbitrary and abusive decision”, declared Tanase. The lawyer went on to add that the judgment would be appealed against in the European Court of Human Rights, as it bore similarity with the case of Dacia Hotel vs. Moldova, in which the latter was obliged to pay millions of euros for damages.