President Nicusor Dan said on Wednesday that "it is clear to everyone where the activity of the intelligence officers stops" and where prosecutors take over in corruption cases.
He was asked, at a news conference at the Cotroceni Palace, if there will still be the SRI intelligence service - DNA anti-corruption agency binomial in corruption cases.
"I specified that when I presented the National Defence Strategy and there, in the National Defence Strategy, I made it very clear, one, corruption is a national security problem, so the Romanian Intelligence Service must deal with this national security problem, but within the limits in which it does not interfere with criminal investigations. That is, the intelligence officer has..., or a part of the Intelligence Service has some officers to deal with the phenomenon of corruption. These officers analyse areas of corruption with specific means and transmit very pertinent information to the prosecutor. Further, they stop there and the prosecutors take care of it. We must also talk about..., this is something that I think is clear to everyone, where the activity of the intelligence officer stops and we must, on the other hand, have a certain quality of the notification on corruption, which I do not know if we have at this moment," said Dan.
On November 26, 2025, when he unveiled in Parliament Romania's National Defence Strategy - which mentions corruption as a vulnerability of the state - that there will be a unit in the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) that will deal with corruption cases.
"The strategy has many chapters, of course, if we talk about sabotage, acts of intel gathering, all this, the services will have the same attributions they havehad so far. The novelty is expressly in the area of corruption (...). SRI is an intelligence service that is divided into departments (...). Some deal with counterespionage, others with sabotage, organised crime, all sorts of things. By putting the corruption chapter in the strategy very explicitly, we will have a unit or a section within the SRI that will deal with corruption, and its only task will be to collect information about corruption."
Back then he said that the involvement of the secret services in corruption investigations will not lead to a situation like the previous one.
"We have to say very clearly what happened then. It happened that the Service also went to the criminal investigation area and also went to the trial area, unfortunately. The law at that time did not say that the Service should be involved in the criminal investigation, nor that it should be involved in trials. The question is what the mechanisms of the rule of law are that prevent this involvement. There can only be, on the one hand, the civilian control of the activity, including the president, and on the other hand, the courts. I guarantee you that we will not return [to the past]," Dan said back in November 2025.
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