Supreme Court notifies Constitutional Court on GEO 14 upon Alina Bica’s request. Will GEO 13 be revived?

The magistrates of the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ICCJ – Supreme Court) have notified on Friday the Constitutional Court in regard to Government Emergency Ordinance 14/2007, upon the request coming from the former chief of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), Alina Bica, in the file she is charged with abuse of office.

Bica claims, in the request, among others, that if the GEO 13 hadn’t been abrogated, then she would have benefited from the more favourable law and the abuse of office would have been decriminalized.

New hearings were held at the ICCJ on Friday in Alina Bica’s file for abuse of office with particularly serious consequences, completed as State Secretary and Justice Ministry representative at the Central Committee for Settlement of Compensations within the National Authority for Restitution of Property (ANRP).

In the same file are included other persons, members of the committee: Crinuța Dumitrean, Dragoș Bogdan, Lăcrămioara Alexandru, Sergiu Diacomatu, Cătălin Teodorescu and Remus Baciu. Other persons prosecuted are assessor Emil Nuțiu, businessmen Stelian Gheorghe and Dorin Cocoș, his son Alin Cocoș and Ionuț Florentin Mihăilescu, former adviser to the DIICOT chief.

“On March 15, 2011, defendants Dumitrean, Diacomatu, Teodorescu, Baciu, Bica, Vasilescu, Bogdan and Alexandru, as members of the committee, through the abusive exercise of office duties (…), unanimously approved the assessment report by Emil Nuţiu, expert at SC Business Evaluator SRL, by which the value of a land of over 13 hectares was set at RON 377,282,300. This represents an overvaluation of the land by RON 263,327,559, which has led to damages equivalent to this amount to the detriment of the state budget and facilitated the obtaining of some patrimonial benefits by Gheorghe Stelian and other persons,” the prosecutors say.

According to DNA, on June 14, 2014, Alina Bica received, through her former adviser Ionuţ Mihăilescu and in equal parts with him, a land of 4,425 square meters in Snagov, Ilfov County.

The handing of this land was in close connection with the validation that Alina Bica had on March 15, 2011 as State Secretary and representative of the Ministry of Justice in the Central Committee for the Settlement of Compensations within ANRP, for a claim for damages for land in Bucharest.

Alina Bica was sentenced on January 26 to 3 years and 6 months imprisonment for the offense of favouring the offender in connection with interventions for classifying a file in which businessman Horia Simu was involved.

This was the second sentence for Alina Bica. In November 2016 she was sentenced to 4 years imprisonment for the offense of encouraging the perpetrator in a file involving former minister Adriean Videanu. The decision in this case is not final.

Bica was sentenced for the offense of favouring the perpetrator, being acquitted for the offense of abuse of office, the same source informs.

Sources quoted by ‘Romania Journal’ in early February said that the draft Emergency Ordinance for amending the Criminal Codes (GEO 13/2017), which drew hundreds of thousands of Romanians in the street, had been written by Alina Bica. The draft was appropriated by the then Justice Minister Florin Iordache, who has made several changes.

Alina Bica’s challenge is not the first one in court, but it is the first one addressed to the Constitutional Court.

In mid February two appeals asking for the GEO 14 suspension were filed in court. The emergency ordinance no 14 was adopted to repeal the controversial emergency ordinance no 13 that planned to amend the criminal law and decriminalized certain corruption offenses, including the abuse of office. After the previous two appeals filed in Bucharest, another two have been filed at the Constanta Court of Appeal.

Thus, the GEO 14 is now challenged by the former mayor of Navodari town, Nicolae Matei, sentenced to one year and six months in prison in 2016.

The National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) indicted the mayor for three crimes of abuse of office in continued form-attempt to abuse crime, bribe and setting up an organized criminal group. However, the mayor was released from prison in August last year.

The emergency ordinance repealing the controversial GEO 13 amending the criminal law was also challenged in court to the Bucharest Court of Appeal. The first complaint was filed by Luiza Cazanescu, charged with abuse of office and sentenced to three years and two months in prison in first court.