The Superior Council of Prosecutors (CSP) has rejected the request by which prosecutor Elena Cazacov, who has so far served as interim head of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office (PA), was to be appointed as interim deputy chief prosecutor of the PA. A decision to this effect was handed down by the members of the SCP on Friday, August 5.

Asked by Ziarul de Gardă, prosecutor Elena Cazacov said she could not comment on the PSC’s decision, but could only “comply”. Elena Cazacov began her career as a prosecutor in 2010 in the Prosecutor General’s Office (PG). In 2013, Cazacov was appointed as a prosecutor in the PG’s Anti-Human Trafficking Section. Later, in 2018, she was transferred to the position of prosecutor in the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office.

Cazacov is the prosecutor who represented the state prosecution in the case of former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, who was sentenced in June 2016 to 9 years in prison and released on parole in December 2019 from detention before his term.

Cazacov also prosecuted the “bribery for judges” case, and once the examination of the criminal prosecution case was completed, she asked the court to acquit, on several counts, the magistrates Galina Moscalciuc, Svetlana Tizu, Liubovi Brânză, Ludmila Ouș and Victoria Hadîrcă, investigated for corruption, and to acquit the other five defendants in full. In the reasoning of the requests for acquittal on most of the charges, it is stated that “the acts of the defendants do not meet the elements of the crime”.

For 2021, Elena Cazacov declares salary income from the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office in the amount of 345 435 lei. The prosecutor also declares an apartment with an area of 71.5 square meters, bought in 2015, for just over 455 thousand lei (around 23,150 euros). According to the declaration of wealth and personal interests, in 2020 Cazacov bought a KIA car, manufactured in 2013, for 9 367 euros. Her family also owns a GMC car, manufactured in 2019 and purchased in 2021 for $14,000.

In 2018, Elena Cazacov was targeted in a ZdG investigation about prosecutors helped with donations of millions. At the time, ZdG wrote that Elena Cazacov, then a prosecutor in the department against human trafficking of the PG, together with her husband, a police employee, received a donation of 15 thousand euros from Sergei Cazacov, the prosecutor’s father, in 2017. With part of this money, the couple bought an apartment and a Hyundai Tucson car, which the Cazacovs sold in 2020.