Romanian President Klaus Iohannis recently approved prosecutors’ request to launch a formal criminal investigation into graft allegations that have been leveled against Calin Popescu Tariceanu, a former prime minister and senate speaker. Tariceanu is alleged by anti-corruption prosecutors to have accepted bribes from an Austrian company in 2007 and 2008. However, he has denied any wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of a political witch-hunt by Iohannis.


The decision to allow the prosecutors to begin a criminal investigation into the allegations against the former prime minister was made against the backdrop of pervasive corruption that has afflicted the Romanian political arena and justice system. Political corruption has remained a persistent and pervasive problem. Anti-corruption prosecutors have repeatedly found instances of fraud, abuse of power, conflicts of interest, and bribe-taking by political officials across the political spectrum. Romania was recently ranked by Transparency International as being among the most corrupt EU member states.


The European Commission has maintained a similar assessment ever since Romania was first admitted as a member state of the EU a decade and a half ago. The EC set up what was to be a temporary mechanism to verify and to guarantee that Romania met a number of anti-corruption targets. However, the EC has found itself unable to dismantle that mechanism to date—15 years after Romania joined the EU—because Bucharest has still not met the minimum goals.


In one of the most prominent corruption-related affairs to have roiled Romania last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Laura Codruta Kovesi, a former chief Romanian anti-corruption czar. The court found that Ms. Kovesi had been denied the right to freedom of speech and a fair trial by the Romanian authorities after she was summarily removed from office as head of the Romanian National Anticorruption Directorate in July 2018 for critiquing legislation that had been pushed through parliament by the Romanian government.


Allegations of endemic corruption in the Romanian judiciary were also made in a special report that the EC submitted in late 2019 to the European Parliament. The report noted the EC’s finding that the Romanian intelligence services have extensive and unhealthy influence over the Romanian judiciary, which the EC deemed to be lacking in independence. The EC recommended in its report to establish a “framework” in which the Romanian intelligence services would be kept under adequate oversight. The EC report cited this as a necessary precondition to allow for crimes, including crimes of corruption, to be investigated “effectively.”


The report further found that the exceptional power wielded by the Romanian justice minister in appointing senior prosecutors has also had an inimical effect on the independence of the Romanian judiciary. That power grants the minister and the minister’s party vast control over which candidates are appointed as prosecutors and which sitting prosecutors are to be sacked. This has created undue political influence, the report said, and has paved the way to unwarranted prosecution of rivals as well as exempting political allies from prosecution.



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