The mayor of Iași, Mihai Chirica, was placed under judicial control for 60 days, for continuous intellectual forgery and instigation to usurp the power, national anti-corruption body (DNA) announced on Friday. Former Deputy Mayor Gabriel Harabagiu is also being prosecuted in the same case.
According to the prosecutors, Mihai Chirica and Gabriel Harabagiu would have ordered / signed documents in violation of the law, in the procedure of attesting the construction, respectively of the extension of a building in Iași. The block was allegedly built and tabulated illegally, with several levels compared to those provided in the permit, and the surface of the building is larger than the permit, being violated the zonal urban plan. The tabulation of the building in the land book would have been done with the support of the management and of some officials from the local public authority, based on the certificate of attestation of the building construction / extension, dated 10.10.2018, issued by the municipality of Iași.
Prosecutors point out that during the construction attestation procedures there were three different variants in terms of content or persons who signed the certificate, all variants having the same registration number and the same date. The issuance of the certificate created, for the beneficiary company, the possibility to register the property right over the building in the land book and to proceed with the sale of the apartments in the respective building, DNA shows.
Under the judicial control procedure, Chirica is banned from exerting his duties as mayor.
Prosecutor also said that the mayor of Iași was warned that, in case of breach of these obligations in bad faith, the measure of judicial control can be replaced by the measure of house arrest or the measure of pre-trial detention.
In retort, the mayor announced he would challenge the judicial control in court, and that he would resort to all legal provisions in order to prove his innocence.
Mihai Chirica is targeted in two criminal cases. One of them, implemented by DIICOT, aims at a business with a plot of land in the city center. In April 2021, Mihai Chirica announced that he was suspending himself from the management of the Iași branch of PNL and would “focus on administrative activity”. His reaction came a day after the intervention of President Klaus Iohannis, who said he would demand a reaction from the PNL in the case of Mihai Chirica, accused of corruption, and the head of the Iasi County Council, Costel Alexe, also prosecuted by DNA.