Romania to Get Two New Ministers

Liberal Puiu Hasotti, 59, is to become Romania's new Culture Minister on Monday, after Mircea Diaconu resigned last week following a ruling by the Supreme Court that bans him from holding public office for three years.

Diaconu was penalised because he held the position of manager of a public theatre while being a Senator as well, which breaks Romanian law.

By the end of the week, Romania is to also have a new Education Minister, following 45 days during which the interim position was held by another member of the cabinet. 

The new Education Minister is to become Ecaterina Andronescu, 64, a member of the ruling Social Democratic Party, PSD.

Last month, Education Minister Ioan Mang resigned as a result of a row over his alleged plagiarism of scientific papers.

A teacher of Information Technology at Oradea University in northwest Romania, Mang was accused of copying academic works by researchers from Japan, Israel and Taiwan on IT - including some of their mistakes - in several of his papers.

He said the charges were politically motivated.

The resignation came after the Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, was forced to drop his first candidate for the education portfolio.

Corina Dumitrescu was also at the centre of a scandal after the media spotted several grammatical and spelling mistakes in her CV. A short investigation concluded that Dumitrescu had never studied at Stanford University, as she had claimed in her CV, on which the university's name was also misspelled.

Ironically, Prime Minister Ponta is now also facing plagiarism accusations. Last week, a science journal, Nature, said that documents presented by a whistleblower show that substantial sections of Ponta's PhD thesis were identical, or almost so, to material in monographs written by other Romanian law scholars. Ponta obtained his PhD in 2003 from the University of Bucharest.

Ponta on Friday said he was innocent and dismissed talk that he might quit as a result of the plagiarism accusations.

Romania’s new government won parliamentary approval on May 7. The 20 seats in the cabinet have been split between the Social Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, the major parties in the new ruling coalition, the Social Liberal Union, USL.

Ponta, 40, was nominated for the premier's post by President Traian Basescu  following a vote of no-confidence against the cabinet of Mihai Razvan Ungureanu.