The suspended chief of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office Viorel Morari said Prosecutor General Alexandr Stoianoglo’s proposal to constitute panels of judges for examining the cases started over the bank fraud and the related cases is a hasty approach that appeared as a result of the wish to control the judicial system, IPN reports.

In an open letter, Viorel Morari says this approach seems at least strange to him as the prosecutor general referred not to specialized courts of law, but only to panels of judges. Under the Constitution, specialized courts not specialized panels can deal with particular categories of cases. “If we draw a parallel between the justice sector reform as part of which the economic courts of law were liquidated and your proposal, we can deduce that you want the restoration of the high level of corruption and the necessity of monopolizing the trying of the bank fraud cases as these were the main arguments for liquidating the economic courts of law in 2011,” runs the letter.

Viorel Morari noted that the formulation “billion theft” cases from the PGO’s press release generates several questions: how the given cases will be selected, according to what criteria? Is there such a category of offenses stipulated in the Penal Code and what criteria will be used to delimit the abuses, embezzlements, stealing from other offenses? “Do the cases against prosecutors (Morari, Bețișor, Baeșu, Statnyi), the cases concerning the NBM, Victoriabank and other cases in which Veaceslav Platon is directly interested form part of this category? How will the criminal procedures and the right to a fair trial be respected if the cases are chosen by prosecutors and random distribution is omitted? How will this mechanism (that is not stipulated by law) correlate with the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights and the ECHR’s practice? How will the requests to replace judges be examined?” he wondered.

According to Morari, press releases informing about dropping of charges against persons involved in this case were issued, but nothing was said about the encountered difficulties. The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office in September-October 2019 published statistical data about the number of investigative measures taken and results achieved in resonant cases, but the PGO now does not do something like this.

As to the case of the expelled Turkish teachers, Viorel Morari said the procurator general definitely knew the sentence and the culprit definitely negotiated with prosecutors.