DNA asks for the criminal prosecution against minister for Parliament Liaison

The anti-corruption chief prosecutor asked the Senate’s go-ahead to criminally prosecute the minister for Parliament Liaison, Viorel Ilie, for charges of abetment in using confidential information and in enabling unauthorized persons’ access to this information.

Three other officials are prosecuted in this file for the same charges: the minister’s cabinet director, Elena-Felicia Pop and two employees at the ministry, members of the contest committee, Maria Alexandrescu and Mihai-Cornel Zaharia.

According to the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA), “the ministry for Parliament Liaison held a contest to hire public servants in the ministry.” DNA says there is evidence the contest has been fixed so that certain candidates agreable to the ministry’s leadership should be hired (of whom one was very close to minister Viorel Ilie). So, the expertize standard became totally irrelevant, DNA argues.

Prosecutors say the written test has been established for July 31, but that minister Ilie had previously made his cabinet director, Felicia Pop, ask the members of the contest committee, Maria Alexandrescu and Mihai-Cornel Zaharia, to disclose him the subjects and the correction norms for the written test.

They would have given the cabinet director the subjects and the norms, “knowing the information was confidential and that it was to be disclosed to certain candidates”.

The cabinet director of the minister gave the “agreeable” candidates the subjects, as well as results on the same day.

“Besides these candidates had access to the contest subjects and their results, being obviously favored against the other candidates, according to the agreement, they have also drafted their papers previously the exam, and on the day of the exam the papers had to be replaced by the ones drafted at home. Moreover, not all the agreable candidates would have met the seniority conditions to occupy those vacant positions. In this respect, before the contest, minister Viorel Ilie ordered that the position statute of the ministry should be amended so that those candidates could be hired,” reads the DNA press release.

Viorel Ilie is a member of ALDE. The party says in a press release on Friday that it will not comment on the anti-corruption prosecutors’ action until the parliamentary procedure is got throug.