The Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) prosecutors have detained a total of 11 people (seven men and four women) in the Nordis case, and the defendants will be taken to the Bucharest Court of Appeal with a proposal for preventive arrest.
Among those detained on Monday evening were Laura Vicol – former head of the Chamber of Deputies’ Law Committee and her husband, Vladimir Ciorba, the main shareholder alongside Gheorghe Postotoaca of real estate developer Nordis.
According to a DIICOT press release, two other people were placed under judicial control.
The charges include the commission of the offences of constituting an organized criminal group, embezzlement with particularly serious consequences, money laundering, tax evasion, fraud with particularly serious consequences, the establishment in bad faith by the taxpayer of taxes, duties or contributions, resulting in amounts of money being obtained without right as reimbursements or refunds from the consolidated general budget or compensation due to the consolidated general budget, all in a continuous form.
Ioana Basescu, daughter of former president Traian Basescu, and former PSD deputy Andreea Cosma were accused of involvement in the Nordis deal, as notaries, but they were allowed by prosecutors to go home.
As a result of the searches carried out on Monday, more than 50 computer systems and data storage devices (laptops, tablets, a server, memory sticks and external hard drives), mobile phones, amounts of money in RON, EUR and other currencies, documents, luxury items (watches, jewelry and bags bearing the logos of well-known brands) were identified and seized.
The investigation targets 40 individuals and 32 companies structured in a three-tier crime group which conceived and implemented a complex fraud mechanism consisting of promoting and developing real estate projects under the cover of several trading companies, followed by the collection of the buyers’ money, embezzlement of company funds, misleading buyers during the execution of pre-contracts and purchase contracts, entry of fictitious operations in the accounting records of the controlled companies in order to evade taxes due to the state budget, and establishing taxes in bad faith (VAT), resulting in ill-gotten amounts as reimbursements, refunds from the state budget or compensations due to the general budget, thus causing damage to trading companies, the buyers and the state budget.
AGERPRES
