Former mayor of Piatra Neamt, Gheorghe Stefan, aka Pinalti, has been sentenced on Monday to three years and nine months in prison in a file targeting the Romanian Post. The ruling pronounced by the Bucharest Tribunal on Monday is not final and can be challenged by appeal.
The court has also noted that the sum of EUR 226,967 received by Stefan in bribe in the deed of influence peddling had been given back.
Gheorghe Ştefan was prosecuted for corruption deeds in a file split from the Romanian Post case
According to the prosecutors’ indictment, in 2009, when he was mayor of Piatra Neamt, Gheorghe Stefan would have proposed businessman Marian Constantinof that he would intervene upon the representatives of the National Post Company, in exchange of money, so that they would assign public contracts to severak companies run by Constantinof.
“The sums of money that Gheorghe Stefan used to pretend were to originate precisely from the revenue obtained from the first contracts. As the money would go to Gheorghe Stefan, the expenses covering the paper expenses would have been taken from the profit generated by the following contracts. A first step in assigning these contracts to the companies controlled by Marian Constantinof was the appointment of defendant Mihăilescu Cosmin Dragoş at the helm of the Stamp Plant on September 8, 2009. At that time, Mihăilescu Cosmin Dragoş was a person close to Constantinof Marian and had the task of controlling and manipulating the public procurement procedures”, anti-corruption prosecutors say.
Gheorghe Stefan, also convicted in the Microsoft file, was released on parole from the Maximum Security Prison in Ploiesti in September 2017.
Meanwhile, last year, the former Piatra Neamt mayor was sentenced to another 3 years and 3 months imprisonment in a file in which he is charged with money laundering and financial operations incompatible with the office.