The Declic Community announced in a release on Thursday having filed a criminal complaint with the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), requesting an investigation into how plagiarism complaints against Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca were canceled in court.
According to the Declic Community, the criminal complaint filed with the Public Prosecutor's Office concerns the crime of altering the integrity of computer data, after reports emerged in the media about an interference in the random assignment of the case from the Bucharest Court of Appeal, for it to get to a handpicked judge.
G4media journalists wrote that the software that randomly assigns the cases in court was tampered with, so that the case in which Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca requested the cancellation of the complaints was assigned on purpose to judge Marius Iosif, "a close friend of the National Liberal Party". Immediately after rejecting the plagiarism complaints against the Prime Minister, the judge retired, the publication reported.
"The method used to assign the file to a particular judge is known as the 'cover method'. Under these circumstances, with suspicions looming that the file was not randomly assigned, we are asking the DIICOT prosecutors to look into whether the law was violated," Declic said.
"The possibility that a Prime Minister thwarts the justice system in order to get rid of accusations that he plagiarized his doctoral thesis is scandalous. Both the file registration error and the sudden retirement of the judge after ruling in favor of Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca seem to be more than a mere coincidence. We have always campaigned for independent justice. We want the citizens to learn the truth and this can only be established through a criminal investigation," said Declic campaigner Ana Racheleanu.
AGERPRES