Romania Jails Former Ministers For Graft

After jailing a former Prime Minister last month, courts in Romania on Tuesday handed down three-year jail sentences to former ministers Decebal Traian Remes and Ioan Avram Muresan for corruption.

Remes, agriculture minister from April to October 2007, was found guilty of peddling influence while Muresan, agriculture minister between 1998 and 2000, was convicted of complicity in the same acts.

In 2007, Remes received €15,000 and food products - such as sausages and spirits - from a businessman, through Muresan, the courts ruled.

The businessman in question in return sought preferential treatment in a tender process managed by a public institution.

The decision can be appealed against.

Muresan was jailed for seven years last year for embezzling 1.2 million US dollars in grants from the United States Agency for International Development, USAID.

Romania is still considered one of the most corrupt states in the European Union and has made only limited progress in fighting corruption and organised crime since it joined the EU in 2007. Bucharest has drawn repeated criticism from the European Commission for its failure to tackle corruption.

But in recent months, the number of high-ranking officials sentenced for graft has increased significantly. On January 31, former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase was sentenced to two years in prison for siphoning-off state funds worth around €1.6 million to fund his 2004 election campaign.

The trial lasted over three years and involved 900 witnesses and 48 court hearings. Nastase was accused of having financed his election campaigns with funds collected for a symposium organized by a state institution for which businessmen had to pay a participation feee. The fees went to four companies controlled by members of Nastase’s entourage.

Nastase, 62, was Prime Minister from December 2000 to December 2004 and stood as the Social Democratic Party, PSD, candidate in the 2004 presidential election. He has faced other corruption allegations, including claims that he secured an artificially low price to build a luxury home in return for giving a top ministerial post to the head of a construction company. He denied all the charges.