Officers of the National Anti-Corruption Center (CNA) are conducting new searches in a criminal case concerning the dispossession of public land by the Chisinau City Hall, CNA announced in a press release on Thursday, February 15. ZdG wrote, back in 2015, about how a bailiff, Evelina Marianciuc, under a suspicious court order, had attributed to herself the role of local public authority, organising auctions for the sale of public land on her own.

• Tens of millions in public land shared by three magistrates and a bailiff
• Judges divide up land in Chisinau

ZdG reported again in 2018 on how, over the past 5 years, through a scheme involving lawyers, bailiffs, judges, businessmen and various officials, the municipality of Chisinau 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.

• Land hunters. How the municipality was dispossessed. Chisinau was stripped of land worth over 100 million lei

According to the facts under investigation, the decision-makers of a public association, in complicity with identified persons, acting in the interest of an organized criminal group, dispossessed the Chisinau City Hall of public land within the municipality. Chisinau, actions qualified under the provisions of Art. 361 para.(2), Art. 27, 190 para. (5), art. 190 para. (5), art. 328 para. (3) lit. c), art. 46, 243 par. (3) (a) and (b) of the Penal Code.

“Members of the organized criminal group, including two bailiffs, organized fictitious auctions in the period 2014-2016, as a result of which they acquired ownership of 29 plots of land in the public domain of the local public administration, thus causing damage of over 135 000 000 lei to the City Hall of the municipality. Chisinau.

Thus, in order to gather evidence on the case, 5 searches were authorized at the homes, offices and means of transport owned/used by two accomplices, and objects and documents of interest to the criminal case were seized. The persons concerned in the criminal proceedings are suspects/defendants,” the CNA said.

The prosecution is being conducted under the procedural direction of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office.

ZdG has been following who the people behind the scheme are, as well as the route of the land. We found that some of it ended up in the ownership of petrol stations, some in the portfolios of construction companies and offshore firms in the UK or the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Some plots of land are now selling for hundreds of thousands of euros, even though they were sold for more than 20 times less.