The chief of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office Veronica Dragalin said that she does not intend to resign following the leaking of Telegram conversations. She noted she took over the institution as a result of a transparent contest and she has no reasons to believe that the contest had been rigged at a time when the authenticity of those chats wasn’t proven, IPN reports.
Representatives of civil society, the parliamentary and extraparliamentary opposition demanded that Veronica Dragalin should quit as head of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office after fragments of Telegram conversations that involved the minister of justice were made public. According to those discussions, Sergiu Litvinenco ensured the contest organized by the Superior Council of Prosecutors (SCP) was won by Veronica Dragalin.
“I will not tender my resignation of honor. I would like to see an example when someone resigned because of a leak from Telegram, which is not known to be true or untrue. I took part in a contest in which I had to provide information about me, a broad management plan about my intentions. The commission consisted of five persons and three of them were from outside the country. I had the biggest score. Later, I had a public interview at the SCP. Everyone can see my interview and the interviews of the other candidates. I do not see how the contest could have been rigged and do not see reasons to resign,” Veronica Dragalin stated in the program “Secrets of the Power” on JurnalTV channel.
Moreover, the chief of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office said the institution loses precious time on the management of cases of petty corruption and the cases of grand corruption remain stagnant therefore. A plan for restructuring the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Anticorruption Center (NAC) was designed and the institution she leads will now concentrate all its resources on cases of grand corruption.
“We use a lot of resources, people who daily work on cases that do not represent grand corruption. These are cases of systemic, petty corruption. But each case, even a case of US$100 bribe, means a lot of work for an officer, a prosecutor. The biggest problem derives from here. We, those from the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, must manage all the cases of the NAC and there are no limits there. A case of 300 lei bribe comes to us. I think it would be much more efficient if the people from the NAC focused on more complex cases,” noted the chief anticorruption prosecutor.
Veronica Dragalin took over the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office on August 1, 2022 after the Superior Council of Prosecutors designated her as the winter of the contest to fill the post of chief of the institution. She earlier served as deputy prosecutor in the in Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section of the United States Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California.
