After Huge Floods, Civil Servants to Face Prosecutor’s Investigation

The recent flooding in Western Romania left behind not only the carcasses of wild and domestic animals but also the putrid corpses of dubious business deals conducted by public servants of the National Company for Land Improvement, in charge with reinforcing the dams and securing the land against such natural disasters.

It is now certain that these officials siphoned public money to personal needs, a report of the Ministry of Agriculture found.
The document, dated 18 May, lists on 11 pages the huge number of breaches to the law. Consequently, Minister Gheorghe Flutur decided to sack the regional leadership of the National Company and to refer the findings of the internal investigation to the prosecutors.
Fictitious land improvements worth billions of lei [hundreds of thousands of euros] were billed to the state, while the actual "improvements" targeted the personal deals of the civil servants.
Thus, the results of the journalistic investigation conducted by Jurnalul National and published two weeks ago were confirmed.
Allegedly tens of thousands of cubic meters of earth were transported 50 kilometers away, at a cost of 817 million lei. But no trace of the means of transportation employed for the huge task could be found. Another project, on behalf of a meat processing plant in Timisoara was paid for in kind, with 30 million lei worth of meat. But the regional subsidiary of the National Company did not held any papers proving it used the meat for its own employees.
The report of the Ministry of Agriculture also found that in 2004 the work for the so-called improvement of land in the regions which were flooded consisted in fact in chopping off the vegetation, while five billion lei were used for computers and office furniture.
Though the control of the regional subsidiary took place at the height of the flooding crisis, "neither the leadership not the rank-and-file civil servants were at work at 3:30 p.m." the report stated.