Moldovan opposition leader gets 15 years for huge bank theft

By Alexander Tanas

CHISINAU (Reuters) – A court in Moldova on Thursday imposed a 15-year jail sentence in absentia on the leader of a small opposition party in connection with the theft of $1 billion in bank assets in the impoverished European state.

Business magnate Ilan Sor, head of a party bearing his name, had an earlier sentence confirmed by the Chisinau Appeal Court on charges of fraud and money laundering in an affair known locally as the “theft of the century”.

Sor has in recent months stood behind street protests denouncing high prices and calling for the resignation of the pro-Western government in the tiny country wedged between Ukraine and Romania.

The 15-year sentence was double the original 7 1/2-year jail term handed down by a lower court in 2015. The appeal court also ordered the confiscation of assets valued at the equivalent of $277 million.

Sor’s appeal dragged on for eight years. In 2019, he secretly left the country and is now believed to be in Israel.

“The justice system has finally triumphed in our country,” Olesea Stamate, a senior parliamentarian from the ruling PAS party, wrote in announcing the sentence on social media.

Pro-European President Maia Sandu, elected in 2020 on a pledge to root out corruption, said the sentence was vital as a public display of justice being done.

“This was necessary for our citizens, so that those who stole returned the money and that justice was done,” Sandu said in a statement on social media.

Sor, whose party has six of the 101 seats in the Moldovan legislature, dismissed Thursday’s sentence as illegal.

“This ruling doesn’t bother me in the least and I won’t abide by it,” he wrote on Facebook. “It will be rescinded two days after the current regime is replaced.”

The 2014-2015 theft from three of the country’s largest banks amounted to the equivalent of one eighth of national annual output.

Moldova has already jailed former prime minister Vlad Filat and businessman Veaceslav Platon in connection with the scandal, in which money was for years siphoned overseas through dubious loans, asset swaps and shareholder deals.

Sor was associated with the man deemed the mastermind of the theft, Vlad Plahotniuc, who wielded huge political and financial influence as leader of the Democratic Party.

In 2020, Moldovan prosecutors charged Plahotniuc with creation of an organised criminal group, extortion and fraud in relation to the theft.

Plahotniuc, whose lawyers deny he was involved, has also fled the country.

(Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by David Ljunggren and Daniel Wallis)