Gabriel (Puiu) Popoviciu has been totally acquitted by Bucharest’s Court docket of Attraction after an 18 12 months authorized ordeal within the case surrounding the Băneasa buying, workplace and residential improvement.
Popoviciu was exonerated together with the opposite ten defendants within the case. Choose Liana Arsenie, the pinnacle of the Court docket of Attraction, handed down her judgment this month, which included a stinging critique of prosecutor Nicolae Marin (of Romania’s Nationwide Anti-Corruption Directorate, generally known as the DNA) and his conduct within the case.
Choose Liana Arsenie defined that she was ordering the acquittal of all 11 defendants on the grounds that that the alleged offences don’t exist. She went on to elucidate how prosecutor Nicolae Marin had fabricated the case: “The investigating authority assigned fictitious roles and functions and imagined authority relationships. The prosecution was built on a scenario imagined by the prosecutor.” She highlighted “truncated interpretations, the breaking of logical-legal algorithms and the attribution of criminal connotation to the exercise of civil rights and obligations.”
Popoviciu and his ten fellow defendants had been accused by Nicolae Marin of abuse of workplace, bribery and favouring the offender in reference to SC Băneasa Investments SA’s undertaking on a 224-hectare plot of land the place the most important buying, workplace and residential complicated in Romania was constructed. The July 2024 verdict from Bucharest’s Court docket of Attraction discovered that these allegations, involving an alleged present of a bottle of whiskey and a PET bottle of do-it-yourself plum brandy, plus the supply of a place for the witness Motoc Ion, who later confirmed he by no means acquired such a suggestion, had been utterly fabricated by prosecutor Marin Nicolae. The July 2024 acquittal judgement comes on account of the evaluate and retrial of the case and firmly concludes that the defendants had been convicted abusively.
The choice on the Court docket of Attraction in Romania adopted one other associated court docket win for Popoviciu in the UK. In July 2023, the UK’s Supreme Court docket discharged Romania’s extradition request for him. That was the UK court docket’s ultimate resolution on the matter and meant that Popoviciu is not going to be extradited to Romania. That ultimate end result adopted the 11 June 2021 resolution by London’s Excessive Court docket to refuse Popoviciu’s extradition to Romania. In that ruling, British choose Lord Justice Holroyde said: “The evidence shows a real risk that the appellant suffered an extreme example of a lack of judicial impartiality, such that there can be no question as to consequences for the fairness of the trial.” Edward Fitzgerald KC mentioned that Popoviciu would undergo a “flagrant denial of justice” if despatched again to serve his sentence in Romania.
A French lawyer based mostly in Bucharest mentioned: “It’s positive for Romania that this case has finally been resolved. Vindictive and fabricated prosecutions have no place in the European Union.”
