The Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection, the mayor’s offices and the Customs Service are the institutions where the largest number of acts of corruption were discovered in 2019, IPN reports, with reference to the National Anticorruption Center.
As many as 56 cases of corruption were traced at the Ministry of the Interior. By 26 cases were reported at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection and the local public authorities. Twenty-one cases were discovered at the Customs Service, 17 in law offices, 13 at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research, by five at the Ministry of Agriculture, Regional Development and Environment and the National Food Safety Agency and four in the justice sector.
The acts of corruption involved 45 police inspectors, 28 heads of autonomous institutions, 18 directors and vice directors of state-run enterprises, 11 mayors and deputy mayors, five persons working in the healthcare system, four customs inspectors, three education sector employees, two tax inspectors, a director and a vice director of national agencies. In the freelance and private sectors, such cases involved 180 private individuals, 24 enterprise and organization directors, three bailiffs and 18 lawyers.
By the level of gravity, 474 offenses were classed as grave and especially grave, 134 as less grave and 44 as minor. As the previous years, the municipalities of Chisinau and Bălți, followed by Cahul, were most affected by corruption. The investigating officers in the period managed 1,891 criminal cases, with 156 persons being arrested within these. Fifty persons of these were placed in remand detention.
Contacted by IPN for a comment, Galina Bostan, president of the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption, said these authorities are perceived by the people as the most corrupt ones in almost all the conducted opinion polls. The picture was much the same the previous years. The analysis was carried out based on denouncements received by the National Anticorruption Center from people in the course of the year and this does not show that the scale of corruption is smaller in the justice sector, for example.
