Prosecutor’s Office starts legal action over passive corruption at Moldtelecom

The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office opened a legal case over passive corruption after videos showing an employee of Moldtelecom taking bribe from an economic entity were shown in a news conference, Info-Prim Neo reports, quoting a communiqué from the institution. In a news conference on Mat 19, the Civil Society Congress presented videos showing, according to the organization’s chairman Fiodor Ghelici, an employee of the law division of the national telecoms carrier, who would have taken bribe from the director of a limited liability company that had contractual relations with Moldtelecom. Fiodor Ghelici said the limited liability company signed a contract for the extraction of precious metals from the equipment of broken telephone stations with Moldtelecom six years ago. Under the contract, 66% of the value of the extracted metals that were sold to the state were transferred to the accounts of Moldtelecom. The rest of the money remained to the company. According to Ghelici, this scheme had been used until last spring, when the administration of Moldtelecom was changed. Then, the representative of the law division asked that the company provide another 10% as recompense for maintaining the contract, besides the 66%. Another scheme started to be used last summer. The employee of Moldtelecom already claimed US$2.5 dollars per number. If a telephone station with 2,000 numbers was closed, the recompense for Moldtelecom totaled US$5,000.