Prosecutors of the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) asked the General Prosecutor’s office to request President Klaus Iohannis approval to investigate four former ministers, namely Mihai Tanasescu, Dan Ioan Popescu, Sebastian Vladescu and Gheorghe Pogea in a case related to the Rompetrol Company.
They are charged of forming an organized crime group, of office abuse and complicity to embezzlement.
The DIICOT alleges that then finance minister Tanasescu and then minister of economy and trade Popescu acted in bad faith in 2003 to promote an emergency ordinance of the government to convert into shares subscribed by the Ministry of Public Finance debts of 603 million dollars of the Rompetrol company. The act was eventually adopted by the government under a procedure that breached the relevant laws.
Vladescu, finance minister from 2005 to 2007 and from 2009 to 2010, and Pogea, finance minister from 2008 to 2009, subsequently breached the legal provision that compelled to the registration of these shares, which would have allowed trading them at the Bucharest Stock Exchange to recover the money owed to the state.
