SOURCES The Criminal Prosecution and Forensic Section of the General Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the random assignment procedure of the case in which Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă obtained the dismissal of the submissions in the case of his doctoral thesis / Who is the prosecutor in charge

The General Prosecutor’s Office is working on a file investigating how, in April, at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, the random allocation of case 2826/2/2022 took place, several judicial sources confirmed to G4Media.ro. In this case, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă obtained a ruling from Judge Marius Iosif annulling the three petitions filed in January to verify suspicions of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis defended in 2003 at the „Carol I” National Defence University.

In a response to G4Media.ro on the status of this case, the Information and Public Relations Office of the General Prosecutor’s Office stated that „in view of Article 285 para. 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which stipulates the non-public nature of the proceedings during the criminal prosecution, as well as the provisions of Article 28 of the Guide of good practices on the relationship between the judiciary and the media, approved by the Plenum of the Superior Council of Magistracy by Decision no. 197 of 17 September 2019, the requested information cannot be communicated.”

The same source said that the prosecutor in the case is Mihaiela Iorga Moraru, a magistrate who gained public notoriety in 2017, when she was working in the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) and had a conflict with her boss, Laura Codruța Kovesi. In 2018, the DNA took Mihaiela Iorga Moraru to court for aiding and abetting and forgery, accusing her of carrying out investigative activities outside the legal framework. A few months later, the High Court quashed the DNA indictment.

The prosecutor was subsequently seconded to the Criminal Investigation Department, which was disbanded earlier this year. In March 2022, the Superior Council of Magistrates reassigned Iorga Moraru to the General Prosecutor’s Office, in the Criminal Prosecution and Forensic Section, with powers to prosecute magistrates. The Prosecution and Forensic Section took over part of the work of the former Justice Crimes Investigation Section.

A criminal complaint about the same random assignment was filed last month by the NGO Declic with the Directorate for the Investigation of Organised Crime and Terrorism. „The criminal complaint registered with the prosecutor’s office concerns the crime of altering the integrity of computer data, after information appeared in the press that there had been interference in the random assignment of the case at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, so that it would go to a „dedicated judge”,” Declic said in a press release issued on that occasion.

In June, G4Media.ro revealed that there are strong indications that the random allocation procedure of the file in which Prime Minister Ciucă requested the cancellation of the plagiarism complaints was flawed. The file ended up on the desk of Judge Marius Iosif, who granted Ciucă’s request and, less than a month and a half later, retired. From 2007-2008, Iosif was appointed by the PNL, the party now led by Ciucă, to senior government positions.

The way in which file 2826/2/2022 was assigned was also the subject of a complaint that 14 NGOs, led by the Centre for Legal Resources, lodged with the Judicial Inspectorate – the body empowered to investigate disciplinary offences by magistrates. The institution closed the complaint, but the Centre lodged an appeal.