Ex-District 2 mayor Ontanu, indicted for bribe taking

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Anti-corruption prosecutors indicted former District 2 mayor Neculai Ontanu for bribe taking. Ontanu is currently serving a preventive arrest sentence.

Other three people have been indicted in the same file. Toma Sutru, also under preventive arrest, was indicted for bribe taking and money laundering. Loredana Radu and Aurel Radu, both under house arrest, are indicted for complicity to bribe taking and money laundering.

Prosecutors say that during 2006-2007, defendant Neculai Ontanu, mayor of District 2 Bucharest, accepted the promise of some financial benefits from another person, indicter in this case, to facilitate the procedure of the property right’s restitution on several plots of land totaling 83,500 square meters in the District 2 area.

“After he issued the property title, Ontanu received a plot of land of 1,500 sqm on Barbu Vacarescu street, which was transferred by the indicter, free of any charge, through some dummy sales contracts to suspect Loredana Radu and another person, who were in fact the mayor’s agents,” reads the DNA release.

Investigators also say that on November 13, 2007 two sales contracts have been signed through which the plot of land on Barbu Vacarescu street had been passed the Loredana Radu and to the other person for an underrated price, EUR 50 per sqm, 10 times cheaper than the market price.

“In practice, no money was paid, with the plots of land being transferred on the account of the bribe promised to mayor Ontanu”, concludes the release.

The plot of land had a market share of about EUR 4.2 M, based on the sums with which it has been re-sold shortly after the dummy transaction had been concluded.

Neculai Ontanu intended to run for a new term of District 2 mayor at the local elections in June on behalf of the National Union for Romania’s Progress (UNPR), with the Social Democrat Party’s endorsement. Immediately after Ontanu was detainedm PSD announced it would nominate another person to run for the District 2 city hall.

Later on, it was revealed that the indicter in the Ontanu case is businessman Cristian Borcea, former director of Dinamo Football Club. Borcea is the one who would have resorted to Ontanu so that an owner should benefit of the illegal retrocession of a plot of land. Cristian Borcea is currently serving a jail sentence in the high-sounding Transfers file. He was sentenced in 2014 to six years and four months in prison.

Lawyer Loredana Radu, also indicted in this case, accused of supporting Ontanu to take a plot of land as bribe, is the niece of former Vice-premier Gabriel Oprea. She defended in court former PM Victor Ponta and Mircea Cosma and Nicolae Dumitru, she also worked for one of the companies owned by businessman Dorin Cocos, ziare.com reports.

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