Justice Minister Sergiu Litvinenco announces on Thursday, January 19, that he issued orders to withdraw the licenses and terminate the work of two bailiffs. They are George Botan and Nicolae Pasha. According to the official, the orders are based on the decisions of the disciplinary college which found that the two executors “grossly violated the legislation, their duties and did not comply with court decisions”.

“I hope that the decisions given will be a clear signal that illegalities and mockery of people will be stopped, and people to whom some state duties have been delegated, such as bailiffs and other legal professions, are to work only in accordance with the law and with respect for fundamental human rights,” Minister Litvinenco stressed.

The executor “with nine lives”
Ziarul de Gardă previously wrote that in 2011, having been accused of involvement in the Universalbank raid, bailiff George Botan was dismissed from the system by an order of then Justice Minister Oleg Efrim. Shortly afterwards, however, Botan was reinstated. In 2015, another Justice Minister, Vladimir Grosu, signed an order dismissing Botan from his licence on charges of other illegal actions. Shortly afterwards, however, judges again suspended the minister’s order and the executor was allowed to continue his work.

The Chisinau Court of Appeals in early 2016 withdrew his licence again, but the Supreme Court of Justice put the final point on the case. A panel of judges, including Mariana Pitic, the judge who controversially became a member of the Supreme Court, and Oleg Sternioală, a magistrate whose wedding George Botan had attended in autumn 2014, repeatedly ordered that the bailiff’s licence be reinstated.

Criminal auctions on the street of the executor “with nine lives”
In 2019, ZdG also wrote about how two families were left without their properties in central Chisinau after they were sold at auction to repay debts. The houses were alienated at prices several times lower than the market prices, in both cases the same valuation company – “Gofma-Consulting” Ltd. There are also some common names in the two cases, such as the bailiff George Botan, whose office is located a few steps away from the alienated properties, or his brother-in-law Gheorghe Rață, who became the owner of one of the houses.

Land hunters. How the mun. Chisinau of land worth over 100 million lei
At the end of 2018, ZdG reported on a scheme involving lawyers, bailiffs, judges, businessmen and various officials, whereby the Chisinau municipality was dispossessed of more than 30 plots of land with a total area of about 5.5 hectares and a market value of over 100 million lei.

ZdG tracked down the people behind the scheme and the route of the land. We found that some of it ended up in the ownership of petrol stations, others in the portfolios of construction companies and offshore firms in the UK or the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Some plots of land later sold for hundreds of thousands of euros, even though they were sold for more than 20 times less.