A criminal organization led by businessman Vladimir Plahotniuc started to be created in Moldova in 2009. This included influential functionaries, representatives of the police and politicians, many of who are on the outside and continue influencing political, economic and legal processes in the country, journalists of RISE Moldova said in an article that launches a news series of investigations entitled #Plahostan.
Co-author of the project, journalist Vladimir Thorik, told IPN that in 2021 they began to collect and analyze tens of copies of classified court judgments and materials of prosecutors’ indictments. “The thousands of pages help us to realize how the “state captured” by fugitive oligarch VladimirPlahotniuc worked.
“#Plahostan is a series of articles about the most important cases, facts and participants in the criminal organization managed by Plahotniuc. According to prosecutors, they controlled Moldova during ten years. After Plahotniuc fled the country in 2019, Moldova’s Parliament named the period during which Plahotniuc and his clique dominated “state capture”. We called those times “Plahostan”,” said the co-author of the new investigation project.
According to the assessments of Moldovan prosecutor Dumitru Răileanu, which can be found in one of the files mentioned in the investigation, “Plahotniuc Vladimir is to blame for founding and managing a criminal group, organizing its activities, identifying and recruiting members of the criminal organization, creating funds for ensuring financial support for its members and criminal activities”.
Journalist Vladimir Thorik said “the investigation of the methods of subjugating the interests of the criminal grouping of Plahotniuc to particular parties, state institutions and the state in general enables us to realize what corruption, authorities’ non-accountability to society and the foreign geopolitical protection of the gangsters from the country’s administration can lead to.”
In the first installments of the project #Plahostan, RISE journalists presented the story of Plahotniuc’s unjust enrichment in the form of an online game. During five years, the oligarch gained control, in a number of countries, of property to the value of over 2.2 billion lei (more than €100 million), which wasn’t declared and can be now confiscated.
