An audio recording attributed to the head of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office (PA), Veronica Dragalin, from a meeting she held with the PA collective, was published on Wednesday, June 14, by the pulsmedia.md portal. According to the recording, the head of the PA is said to have said that she does not have the patience to go in with “teams of masked men, to someone’s house, at six in the morning”.

“And I can’t wait to personally go in with a taskforce, to someone’s house, at six in the morning, in front of your children, your wives, your husbands, to be arrested, handcuffed and sent to prison. I can’t wait for that to happen. I personally will be there!”, Veronica Dragalin is reported to have said during the meeting.

Requested by Ziarul de Gardă, PA representatives said that “the recording is authentic” and that “it is a portion of the meeting that took place on 7 June 2023, at 9:00 am, with the entire PA staff in the room on the fifth floor of the NAC headquarters, where no persons outside the PA staff were present”.

“(…) My speech was illegally recorded without my knowledge. I encourage this person or persons to publish the entire speech. I have nothing to fear because I have never said anything that I am not ready to say in public. Corrupt criminals have something to fear because we have recordings that prove their guilt,” PA chief Veronica Dragalin told ZdG.

On Wednesday, June 7, realitatea.md published a document, writing that CNA officers had filed a collective complaint on behalf of PA head Veronica Dragalin accusing her of intimidation. Crime-moldova.com wrote that Veronica Dragalin had threatened her subordinates with searches and files and asked those “who feel like they may be guilty to voluntarily resign in order to avoid this”.

On Friday, June 9, Veronica Dragalin held a live on the Facebook page of the Prosecutor’s Office, in which she spoke about the situation created between the NAC and the PA, stressing that “we do not have conflicts”. “I think it’s absolutely normal that the heads of two institutions sometimes end up in a situation where there is a disagreement”, this is how Veronica Dragalin, head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (PA), commented on the rumours that appeared on several anonymous Telegram channels about a conflict between her and the director of the National Anti-Corruption Centre (NAC) Iulian Rusu. According to the prosecutor of the head of the PA, the situation presented in the public space has been distorted.

According to the head of the PA, the weekly meeting of anti-corruption prosecutors took place on Monday 5 June, after which some Telegram channels allegedly published false information about her.

“Moldova is a very small country, where many people know each other and have relationships with each other. I have told the staff that several times there have been situations when a complaint about a corrupt lawyer, a former prosecutor in the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, has come to my desk. When something like this comes to my desk, I find it very difficult to know who in the PA I can talk to about this case, who this former prosecutor knows, because I don’t know them. I don’t know the relations between PA employees and other people in Moldova. I told the staff that this is a problem for me and I would like to find a solution. One solution I proposed was that each employee should write a list of all close people, godfathers, brothers-in-law, that they would not want to investigate. I told them that I understand that this is our private life and it would be strange to write such a list and give it to your boss, so I assured them that we wouldn’t necessarily do that, but I told them to think of a solution (…),” Dragalin recounted.

The chief prosecutor claimed that what she discussed appeared distorted on social media.

“Later the same day, information about what I said in the meeting appeared on a Telegram channel, only the version that appeared on Telegram was false. It was said that I, a hysterical person, asked everyone to report to me who the in-laws, godparents and everything else were. They accused me of not respecting the conflict of interest (…)”, according to Veronica Dragalin.

Dragalin also said that she was not surprised by such an action, because she “says every week that there are corrupt people here in our building (PA headquarters n.r.)”.