Former justice minister and head of the Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) of Moldova Vitalie Pirlog, who up until early 2022 had been chairman of the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF), and his colleagues were able to decide which Red Notices should stand and which should be lifted, IPN reports, quoting Bloomberg.
Pirlog, according to the authors of the article, took advantage of a loophole – created by him in 2017 – in the structure of Interpol, and in the fall of 2022, together with his accomplices, began to implement a plan to provide asylum to criminals in Moldova.
According to the reform, Interpol was supposed to suspend Red Notices and diffusions (unverified arrest requests that countries send directly) for persons who were granted refugee status.
After this reform, Red Notices for refugees were to be lifted immediately, and issues were resolved later.
Pirlog and other suspects, according to Bloomberg, led an international corruption scheme that accepted millions of dollars to remove Red Notices for 26 individuals wanted for crimes, including financial fraud and drug trafficking.
Their supposed clients were not petty criminals. Among them were a Russian banker and the son of the former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan. At least half of them were Chinese citizens.
The asylum scheme, allegedly organized in Moldova, operated for about six months - from mid-2022 to early 2023, until Interpol took notice of it and launched an official investigation.
Neither Pirlog nor his lawyer responded to emails and calls from Bloomberg reporters, claiming that Pirlog had been summoned to Moldova for questioning and had not yet appeared.
In November, the Moldovan press reported that his house and other property in the country were seized.
Dossier
Now Pirlog, according to the authors of the article, is the main suspect.
After joining Interpol in 2016 and being appointed chairman of Interpol's CCF, Pirlog worked as an adviser in the Moldovan presidential administration and swiftly rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Justice. He also headed Moldova’s Security and Intelligence Service. Pirlog left Interpol in April 2022 and, investigators suggest, began designing an asylum granting scam a few months later.
In the fall of 2022, Pirlog and a Moldovan lawyer were hired to draft brief statements on behalf of each of the 26 suspects who were subject to Red Notices. These applications were requests for asylum in Moldova. Copies of some of these statements, similar in wording and formatting, were found during a search of Pirlog's home.
The statements used a policy implemented during Pirlog's tenure as CCF chairman, which stipulated that once a country grants refugee status to a person marked with a Red Notice or diffusion, Interpol had to suspend the notice. After receiving 26 applications, Interpol did namely that.
The suspects then applied formally for asylum in Moldova and, although the applications were never subject to mandatory processing in the country, they were still given official case registration numbers. When the CCF tried to verify the legitimacy of their applications, Moldova’s Migration Service, led by another associate of Pirlog, confirmed their veracity.
According to prosecutors, Pirlog and his co-conspirators earned tens of millions of dollars from the scheme by continuing to file Red Notice lifting requests until February 2024, while Interpol investigators and prosecutors were advancing the investigation.
