Exactly a week after it was announced, the bill to set up the Prosecutor's Office for Anti-Corruption and the Fight Against Organized Crime has been voted on first reading in Parliament. Opposition MPs criticized the initiative, which comes from a group of MPs from the Action and Solidarity Party, saying that the government has failed in the fight against corruption and is only trying to further control the judiciary. Some PAS MPs also had some doubts and hesitations over the draft, IPN reports.
According to the draft, the new entity will be the legal successor to the powers currently exercised by the Prosecutor's Office for the Fight against Organized Crime and Special Cases and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office. Thus, files from both institutions are to be transferred to the management of the new institution. "This bill will create a strong prosecutor's office, it will create a prosecutor's office with more prosecutors, more prosecution officers, investigation officers, specialists capable of dealing with those threats, including fighting corruption, big corruption, to provide those results that society expects," said one of the authors, PAS MP Igor Chiriac.
PAS MP Lilian Carp, who is also the chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Public Order, said that he did not see in this draft a mechanism by which "bandits" in the system would no longer be found in the new entity. Respectively, the question is what is to be done so that prosecutors, who instead of dispensing justice, were selling information to those involved in electoral corruption, are removed from the system. The MEP said he would come up with proposals for the second reading, on which his final vote will depend.
In his speech, the former Socialist MP Vasile Bolea, currently unaffiliated, drew attention to a mechanism whereby out of 200 prosecutors, who today are in PCCOCS and PA, only 90 would remain. "Interestingly the others, who will not find themselves in the system, what cases are they investigating today? Are they perhaps not instrumenting the "Leova-Bumbăta" file, or maybe they are instrumenting the gas or electricity procurement file? But maybe they are dealing with the oil procurement file," says Bolea.
PAS MP Vasile Gradinaru said in his speech that he sees a lot of people on the ground who are very upset that during the fall election campaign, "bags of money" were moving from north to south and from east to west. But the results on fighting corruption are zero. And that's why it was decided to change the law on the prosecutor's office. And even if the draft is not perfect, for the second reading, everyone can come up with improvements.
"I was on the fence about whether to support this bill or not. And it was not an easy decision. If you don't support this bill, it would appear that you are defending the sometimes flawed work of these two institutions. But if you support the bill, for me, unfortunately, it means going against the reform measures that have been initiated and are being implemented. In the dilemma of whether to proceed politically, popularly and correctly from the point of view of justice, I chose the latter," said another PAS MP, Olesea Stamate.
The politician says she is aware of the problems in the two institutions, but in her opinion, the Venice Commission's opinion on the project is also needed, or such reforms cannot be made in a hurry. "Let me be clear, I am not in opposition to my party colleagues. It is ok to have different opinions and to express them publicly, democracy is all about that. In dispute most of the time the truth is born", Olesea Stamate said.
Socialist Vlad Batrincea, the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, was puzzled by the fact that the representatives of the prosecutor's office were not invited to express their position on the discussed issues. "What remains of the independence of the prosecutor's office, what results do you expect? Organized crime, big corruption, when you give a political slap over the whole system of the prosecutor's office? What motivation will honest prosecutors have and what guarantees of tenure will they have, if Parliament has amended the Prosecutor's Office Act 12 times. Today is the 13th amendment? What stability of the law, institutional?" the MEP asks.
The vote on the draft law, announced a week ago, comes against the backdrop of the resignation of the head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, Veronica Dragalin, who has been repeatedly criticized by the country's leadership.
Immediately after the information about the intention to merge the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor's Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases appeared in the public space, Veronica Dragalin declared that this initiative was aimed at removing her from the head of the PA. Thus, she justified her decision to leave her post by the desire to stop the liquidation of the PA and PCCOCS. In her opinion, the liquidation of the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office is an attack on the justice system and fundamental values.
