The Chisinau Court of Justice, Centre Court, has ordered former Romanian MP Cristian Rizea, declared an undesirable person and expelled from Moldova, to pay 25 thousand lei to Romanian investigative journalist Emilia Șercan for moral damages. He is also obliged to publicly apologise to the journalist after being accused of distributing defamatory and personal information.

Emilia Șercan is known for exposing plagiarised PhD theses of Romanian politicians. The journalist suspects that the attack on her image may be linked to her revelations about the plagiarism admitted by Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and her investigation into Cristian Rizea’s luxury home in Chisinau.

“I won a first civil lawsuit against the criminal Cristian Rizea, who contributed – along with individuals from the police, politics and media – to the kompromat operation against me, after I wrote that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă had plagiarized in his PhD thesis.

I won moral damages of 25,000 Moldovan lei, and the criminal Rizea is obliged by the Moldovan justice to publicly apologize to me and destroy my personal data on his website (which was closed after he was expelled; really, who closed it?),” Emilia Șercan writes on her Facebook page.

In July 2022, Rizea stated that he had documents that would show that “Emilia Șercan orchestrated the attack on Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă together with the Russian secret services”.

According to Emilia, the purpose of the “kompromat” was publicly announced by the criminal Rizea a year ago, in two live videos on his Facebook page and in a live intervention on Realitatea Plus: “we saved Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă” and that “we buried Emilia Șercan for good”.

The journalist said she had won the case in Moldova and said the Romanian authorities were “acting in concert to bury the files”.

“The files that the criminals want to bury, and the (in)justice generously helps them, are the ones in which I complained about the leakage of evidence from the Romanian police, the ones in which I complained that a securist-political-media cartel used the criminal Rizea to orchestrate the kompromat, and then to cover it up.

The stakes of burying these files – they didn’t bury me, they are trying to bury the files – are so high that (in)justice tramples on everything: law, dignity, honour, common sense. And prosecutors have become the praetorian guard of criminals, some of them politicians with political ambitions.

By not fighting in this case, by protecting the criminals, the (in)justice system in Romania is also becoming the accomplice of those who set up the kompromat and helping them to carry it out”, said the journalist.

However, the decision of the Chisinau Court of Appeal, Centre Court, can be appealed to the Chisinau Court of Appeal within 30 days from the date of delivery.

On 27 April this year, former Romanian MP Cristian Rizea was declared by the General Inspectorate for Migration (IGM) to be an undesirable person on the territory of Moldova for a period of 15 years. Rizea was expelled to Romania, where, having been sentenced to 4 years and 8 months in prison, he was imprisoned in Vaslui Penitentiary, writes Libertatea.

Before being sentenced in Romania, Cristina Rizea settled in Moldova, where she applied for political asylum. Her request was rejected. In March, he also lost his case to have the decree rejecting his asylum application annulled.

Cristian Rizea has been under an international search through Interpol channels for arrest and extradition since 19 March 2019, with a view to serving a prison sentence in Romania for a term of 4 years and 8 months for the crime of influence peddling, money laundering and influencing statements, according to the final sentence issued by the High Court of Cassation and Justice of Romania.