12.10.2012

PRESS RELEASE

The Bureau for Public Information and Press within the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice is commissioned to bring to public knowledge the following:

Pursuing to the investigations in a case file which was formed by means of disjunction from the file also known in the media as “referendum fraud”, prosecutors within the Criminal Investigation and Forensic Department from the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice have started investigations towards the members of an Election Committee from Bolintin Vale, Giurgiu county, and have ordered, on the 12^th October 2012, the opening of a criminal investigation procedure against CEAUŞU DUMITRA and PRODAN NICULAE for falling under the provisions of art. 55 of the Law no. 3/2000.

            From the evidences which were administered in this case, until this moment of the criminal investigation procedure, the following factual situation appeared:

            On the 29^th July 2010, the defendant Ceauşu Dumitra, acting as president of an Electoral Section in Bolintin Vale, Giurgiu county, ordered the setting up of a supplementary list of electors for the mobile electoral urn, certified this list by signing it, without checking out whether the information that it contained were real, gave it to the defendant Prodan Niculae, without the signature fields being completed. The list contained false information as per more persons were inscribed more times or fictitious persons were inscribed there. The defendant used that list in order to introduce in the electoral urn a supplementary number of vote bulletins compared to the ones that were stamped by the electors.

The evidences administered in the case also revealed the fact that the defendant Prodan Niculae, acting as a member of the same Election Committee, did not verify if the persons which were inscribed on the supplementary voting list for the mobile urn requested to vote by using this method (by filling up a formal request), went to the addresses of the persons who requested to vote by use of mobile urn, without thoroughly verifying the identity documents of the voters, allowing other people than the ones who requested the mobile urn to vote by this method.

Thus, the defendant Prodan Niculae facilitated to third parties the signature of entries corresponding to persons appearing several times on the voting lists. So, he facilitated the signing of the list by fictitious persons and by other individuals who voted at the Polling Station although they were listed on the supplementary voting list, therefore a supplementary number of polling bulletins were put in the voting urn.

We will update the public on further development in this outgoing investigation.