Parliament Standing Bureaus approve dismissal of head of political parties' spending watchdog

The Senate and Chamber of Deputies' Standing Bureaus approved on Thursday the removal from office of the director of the Permanent Electoral Authority's Department for the Control of the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns, Toma - Bogdan Costreie. 

The Standing Bureaus had notified the Law Committees on October 3 to produce a report on three senior civil servants working at the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP): Gabriel-Constantin Sauca, Cristian-Alexandru Leahu, and Toma-Bogdan Costreie. 

On February 26, the Law Committees issued a favorable opinion for Costreie's dismissal as head of AEP's Department for the Control of the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns, stating in their report that no separate procedure had been devised for the contest to fill the position of Department head. Article 42 paragraph 6 of the AEP Act requires the person appointed to director of the AEP Department for the Control of the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns to not have been member of a political party in the last five years; the report says that the relevant documents and the internal audit report show that the candidates did not submit a bona fide declaration on their political affiliation in the last 5 years. 

AEP vice-president Marian Muhulet said that the control on PSD's spending of the subsidies granted to political parties in 2017 was suspended in January and the Court of Accounts had decided that the control should resume in August 2019. 

"The control report is not finalized at this time. The control was suspended in January, following a notification from the Court of Accounts which, according to the law, should have joined us in conducting the control on the subsidies to political parties. Last year, before starting the control, we asked the Court of Accounts to join us, as this activity should have been carried out concomitantly. They replied that they could not come because the action was not scheduled in their control plan for 2018. We renewed our request in December, as checks at several parliamentary political formations had been extended into January, and they answered at the end of January, when we had only one control left to conduct at PSD, that the Court of Accounts plenary had decided that the control on subsidy spending should be conducted in August this year," Marian Muhulet said after he was heard in the joint Law Committees overseeing the AEP president.