Bucharest prosecutors have seized the accounts owned by doctor Gheorghe Burnei from the ‘Marie Curie” Hospital in the file where he is suspected of bribe taking and unauthorized experiments on children, the Bucharest Prosecutor’s Office informed on Friday.
The investigators also seized the money found in the doctor’s office during searches, namely RON 13,343, EUR 5,015 and USD 750.
According to the prosecutors, Gheorghe Burnei was not asking the money directly from parents whose children were to be operated, but he allowed them to “gratify” him with various sums after the procedures.
In some cases, the doctor used to pretend money before the surgeries trying to hide the bribe in an apparently legal form by signing a document by private signature that he used to name donation contract.
The prosecutors’ indictment also shows that the people who get to Burnei and offered him bribe were parents whose children had certain physical deficiencies, which had to be surgically corrected.
At the same time, Burnei used to hospitalize children on long term, which was not medically justified, or had repeatedly hospitalized them without performing any surgical procedure on them so that he could make parents give him money or other benefits to eventually operate them.
Investigators also claim that the surgeon used to resort to threats that he will not operate the children if the parents didn’t conform to his requests.
Gheorghe Burnei is the chief of the Orthopedics Ward of “Marie Curie” Pediatric Hospital in Bucharest and was also professor at the Med School in the Capital, but he has been suspended from the faculty on December 12 for 29 days, when he was placed under house arrest.
In the CV posted on “Carol Davila” Medicina Faculty, Gheorghe Burnei writes that he has performed six surgeries as world premiere, 22 interventions for the first time in Romania, 56 surgeries as a first at “Marie Curie” Hospital and a total of 12,500 surgeries.