Ex-president Vladimir Voronin has been ordered to publicly apologize and pay 30,000 lei in damages to Vitalia Pavlicenco, leader of the National Liberal Party, after accusing her on television back in 2007 of being a former KGB agent and taking money from the Romanian government in her political activity. The Supreme Court of Justice today finally issued an irreversible ruling, putting an end to a lawsuit that lasted for 12 years.
Certificates from the Moldovan Security and Intelligence Service and from the Romanian Secret Service Archive confirmed that Voronin told a lie, said Pavlicenco. “A precedent has been created in that a president is not allowed to slander people whenever he feels like it”, Pavlicenco told IPN.
While the awarded damages are far less than the 500,000 lei requested, the politician says the sheer fact that she finally won is satisfactory enough. “It did affect my career, but what matters in the end is that I was able to prove in all the courts that everybody who maligned me were wrong”.
Vladimir Voronin was not available to comment.
In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights fined the Moldovan government for freezing Pavlicenco’s lawsuit. In 2015, a Government invested with the help of Voronin and his Communist Party unsuccessfully challenged the ECHR judgment to the Grand Chamber.
